Revisiting reopened bugs in open source software systems

TL;DR

This study revisits reopened bug prediction in open source projects using modern machine learning techniques across 47 projects, revealing limited predictive success and identifying key reasons for bug reopenings.

Contribution

It introduces an updated prediction pipeline and large-scale analysis, providing new insights into the causes of bug reopenings in open source software.

Findings

Only 34% of projects achieve acceptable prediction performance (AUC >= 0.7).

Majority of reopened bugs (94%) are due to patch issues in projects with good prediction performance.

Four main reasons for bug reopening: technical, documentation, human, and others.

Abstract

Reopened bugs can degrade the overall quality of a software system since they require unnecessary rework by developers. Moreover, reopened bugs also lead to a loss of trust in the end-users regarding the quality of the software. Thus, predicting bugs that might be reopened could be extremely helpful for software developers to avoid rework. Prior studies on reopened bug prediction focus only on three open source projects (i.e., Apache, Eclipse, and OpenOffice) to generate insights. We observe that one out of the three projects (i.e., Apache) has a data leak issue -- the bug status of reopened was included as training data to predict reopened bugs. In addition, prior studies used an outdated prediction model pipeline (i.e., with old techniques for constructing a prediction model) to predict reopened bugs. Therefore, we revisit the reopened bugs study on a large scale dataset consisting of 47 projects tracked by JIRA using the modern techniques such as SMOTE, permutation importance together with 7 different machine learning models. We study the reopened bugs using a mixed methods approach (i.e., both quantitative and qualitative study). We find that: 1) After using an updated reopened bug prediction model pipeline, only 34% projects give an acceptable performance with AUC >= 0.7. 2) There are four major reasons for a bug getting reopened, that is, technical (i.e., patch/integration issues), documentation, human (i.e., due to incorrect bug assessment), and reasons not shown in the bug reports. 3) In projects with an acceptable AUC, 94% of the reopened bugs are due to patch issues (i.e., the usage of an incorrect patch) identified before bug reopening. Our study revisits reopened bugs and provides new insights into developer's bug reopening activities.