Empirical evaluation of technical terms in open source project issues
Abstract
The growing demand for robust and reliable software systems has led the scientific community and the software industry to investigate aspects related to defects reported in bug tracking systems. The overall goal is to understand the causes of defects, and thus establish strategies to prevent their occurrence and spread, reducing possible damage. Defects reported by users via issues in bug trackers reveal important information for developers. The present investigation carried out an analysis of data from 510,212 issues from 85 repositories of open source projects, available on Github. With the help of a list of 608 technical terms selected manually, the frequency in the use of terms by contributors to these repositories was analyzed. The study found the use of terms in the different fields of an issue, as well as the possibility of identifying the terms most used in these repositories. The results of this study point to potential gains in understanding the failure environment by presenting terms that are indicative of defects in fundamental repository structures.
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