M.Sc. in Computer Science

Masters degree in Computer Science

A M.Sc. Dissertation presented to the Federal University of Pernambuco in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.Sc. in Computer Science.

Abstract. Software maintenance and evolution are characterised by their huge cost and slow speed of implementation. Yet they are inevitable activities — almost all software that is useful and successful stimulates user-generated requests for change and improvements. Sommerville is even more

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emphatic and says that software changes is a fact of life for large software systems. In addition, a set of studies has stated along the years that software maintenance and evolution is the most expensive phase of software development, taking up to 90% of the total costs.

All those characteristics from software maintenance lead the academia and industry to constantly investigate new solutions to reduce costs in such phase. In this context, Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a set of activities and standards for managing and evolving software; SCM defines how to record and process proposed system changes, how to relate these to system components, among other procedures. For all these tasks it has been proposed different tools, such as version control systems and bug trackers. However, some issues may arise due to these tools usage, such as the dynamic assignment of a developer to a bug report or the bug report duplication problem.

In this sense, this dissertation investigates the problem of bug report duplication emerged by the use of bug trackers on software development projects. The problem of bug report duplication is characterized by the submission of two or more bug reports that describe the same software issue, and the main consequence of this problem is the overhead of rework when managing these bug reports.

Keywords: bug reports, bug trackers, bug report duplication, change request, tool experiment, bug report duplication characterization study, bug report search and analysis tool

Bibtex entry

@MASTERSTHESIS{CavalcantiMSc2009,
    author = {Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti},
    title = {BAST: A Bug Report Analysis and Search Tool},
    school = {Federal University of Pernambuco},
    year = {2009},
    address = {Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil},
    url = {http://yguarata.com/blog/m-sc-in-computing-science/}
}
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