A survey on bug-report analysis

Abstract Bug reports are essential software artifacts that describe software bugs, especially in open-source software. Lately, due to the availability of a large number of bug reports, a considerable amount of research has been carried out on bug-report analysis, such as automatically checking duplication of bug reports and localizing bugs based on bug reports. To review the work on bug-report analysis, this paper presents an exhaustive survey on the existing work on bug-report analysis. In particular, this paper first presents some background for bug reports and gives a small empirical study on the bug reports on Bugzilla to motivate the necessity for work on bug-report analysis. Then this paper summaries the existing work on bug-report analysis and points out some possible problems in working with bug-report analysis