An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Software Bug Severity And Bug Fixing Change Complexity

With the development of the software industry and the popularization of software applications in the information era,software has been permeating an increasingly wide range of businesses and application areas.As a result,the architecture complexity and code capacity of software projects have reached a level that makes it difficult for developers to understand and manage.This trend makes the maintenance of software projects increasingly difficult.As the main activity of software maintenance,bug fixing has an important impact on the progress of maintenance work.In the process of task assignment,the developer generally assigns the priority of bug fixing according to bug severity level.However,the complexity of bug fixing change also plays an important role in task assignment in the process of bug fixing.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the relationship between bug severity and bug fixing change complexity.In order to study the relationship between bug severity levels and bug fixing change complexity,in this work,a case study was carried out on 13 excellent open source software projects supported by the Apache Software F oundation.First,three indicators were proposed to measure the complexity of bug fixing change,including the number of lines of code,the number of source files,and the number of packages modified during bug fixing.Then,we mapped each bug with its bug fixing commits by parsing its bug report from the issue tracking system and the code commit records from the version control repository,so that the information on code change during bug fixing can be obtained.Finally,the Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to verify whether there were significant differences in the indicators of bug fixing change complexity when fixing bugs of different severity levels.Finally,we found that:(1)for most projects,there is no significant difference in the complexity indicators when bugs with the severity levels of Blocker and Critical are fixed;and(2)for the bugs with the severity level of Major,Minor,and Trivial,the higher the severity level,the greater the bug fixing change complexity.These findings will play an important role in guiding the effort estimating and release plan making during the maintenance phase of the software project,and enable developers to make reasonable task assignments based on the severity levels of bugs to achieve a win-win situation in efficiency and benefits.