An Entropy Evaluation Approach for Triaging Field Crashes: A Case Study of Mozilla Firefox

  • Authors:
  • Foutse Khomh;Brian Chan;Ying Zou;Ahmed E. Hassan

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • WCRE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

A crash is an unexpected termination of an application during normal execution. Crash reports record stack traces and run-time information once a crash occurs. A group of similar crash reports represents a crash-type. The triaging of crash-types is critical to shorten the development and maintenance process. Crash triaging process decides the priority of crash-types to be fixed. The decision typically depends on many factors, such as the impact of the crash-type, (i.e, its severity), the frequency of occurring, and the effort required to implement a fix for the crash-type. In this paper, we propose the use of entropy region graphs to triage crash-types. An entropy region graph captures the distribution of the occurrences of crash-types among the users of a system. We conduct an empirical study on crash reports and bugs, collected from 10 beta releases of Fire fox 4. We show that our proposed triaging technique enables a better classification of crash-types than the current triaging used by Fire fox teams. Developers and managers could use such a technique to prioritize crash-types during triage, to estimate developer workloads, and to decide which crash-types patches should be included in a next release.