Ranking the Bugs: Predicting Which Bugs Will Get Fixed

Presenter(s): 
Room Location: 
S1208
Time: 
Fri, 2009-10-30 10:00

An important question for managing open source communities is how to allocate the resources of volunteers among the many tasks. One time consuming task is reviewing new bug reports. My presentation consists of three parts: First, based on a detailed analysis over the period 1999 -2009 of the Mozilla Bugzilla database I will present graphs showing the role of community members in fixing bugs over the period 1999 - 2009. Second, I will focus on the role of an open source community as an information repository, how such an information repository is build by community members, and how understanding of this artifact shortens repair times. Finally I will talk about some small tools that I developed to help improve the bug fixing process. One of these tools predicts which bug report will get fixed based only on the initial bug report information. My goal is to inform Mozilla community members and give some empirical evidence which might help in developing an improved version of Bugzilla where new bugs are not just ranked based on submission date but are ranked based on most likely to be fixed.