Frequently Asked Questions in Bug Reports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bug tracking systems play a central role in software development since they allow users and developers to submit and discuss bugs and new features. To better understand information and communication needs in bug tracking, we analysed what questions are asked in bug reports. We sampled 600 bug reports from the MOZILLA and ECLIPSE projects and located 947 questions in the reports. Next, we used an open card sort and identified eight categories of questions, which can further be broken down into forty groups. We show the value of this catalogue of frequently asked questions with a large quantitative and qualitative study on when questions are asked and how they are answered. A consequence of our results is that constant user involvement is crucial for successful bug reports and that better tools are needed to support this.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.182 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".