Inside Bug Report Templates

Abstract

In open-source software development, bug report templates (BRTs) have emerged as a crucial tool for ensuring the quality of bug reports. Despite their widespread use, developers have little knowledge about designing personalized BRTs. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the usage, effects, and design guidelines of BRTs. To this end, we conduct the first and most detailed study of BRTs on GitHub by performing quantitative and qualitative analyses in 3,194 projects and 5,987 commit messages of BRTs. We find that BRTs are widely used by open-source projects, especially prevalent in platform-type projects. Adopting BRTs can reduce the average number of comments and increase the likelihood of bug reports being addressed. Additionally, they may help developers identify duplicate reports and bug reports with missing description elements. We also classify the change history of existing BRTs and propose 14 design guidelines for BRTs. We survey 20 developers and 19 reporters on GitHub to investigate practitioners' perceptions of BRTs. The majority of respondents acknowledge the importance of BRTs. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions and provide actionable suggestions for practitioners. Show more