How Long Will It Take to Fix This Bug?

  • Authors:

  • Cathrin Weiss;Rahul Premraj;Thomas Zimmermann;Andreas Zeller

  • Affiliations:

  • Saarland University, Germany;Saarland University, Germany;Saarland University, Germany;Saarland University, Germany

  • Venue:
  • MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Predicting the time and effort for a software problem has long been a difficult task. We present an approach that automatically predicts the fixing effort, i.e., the person-hours spent on fixing an issue. Our technique leverages existing issue tracking systems: given a new issue report, we use the Lucene framework to search for similar, earlier reports and use their average time as a prediction. Our approach thus allows for early effort estimation, helping in assigning issues and scheduling stable releases. We evaluated our approach using effort data from the JBoss project. Given a sufficient number of issues reports, our automatic predictions are close to the actual effort; for issues that are bugs, we are off by only one hour, beating na篓ýve predictions by a factor of four.