The Art of Collecting Bug Reports

Speaker: 	Dr. Thomas Zimmermann
		Microsoft Research

Title:		"The Art of Collecting Bug Reports"

Date:		Monday, 6 December 2010

Time:		10:00 am - 11:00am

Venue:		Room 2404 (via lifts 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

Kids love bugs, and some kids even collect bugs and keep them in precious
jars. Over a period of time, bug collectors can amass a large number of
different species of bugs. But we software developers do not like bugs. We
hope to have none in our software, and when they are found, we squash
them! Unfortunately, squashing bugs, or more politely, responding to
software change requests, is rarely easy.

In my talk, I will present several empirical studies on how developers
collect bug reports, both in open-source projects and at Microsoft. I will
first show the importance of good quality bug reports, then describe
information needs of developers, characterize which bugs get fixed, and
discuss common reasons for reassignments. I will close my talk with
recommendation for better bug tracking tools.


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Biography:

Thomas Zimmermann received his Diploma degree in Computer Science from the
University of Passau, and his PhD degree from Saarland University,
Germany. He is a researcher in the Empirical Software Engineering Group at
Microsoft Research, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His research interests
include empirical software engineering, mining software repositories,
software reliability, development tools, and social networking. He is best
known for his research on systematic mining of version archives and bug
databases to conduct empirical studies and to build tools to support
developers and managers.

Dr. Zimmermann co-organized an ICSM working session on Myths in Software
Engineering (MythSE '07) as well as workshops on software defects (DEFECTS
'08 and '09) and recommendation systems in software engineering (RSSE '08
and '10). He received two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards for his
work published at the ICSE '07 and FSE '08 conferences. He has served on a
variety of program committees, including ICSE, MSR, PROMISE, ICSM, and the
ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys). He is co-chair of the
program committee for MSR '10 and '11. His homepage is
http://thomas-zimmermann.com.