Towards a Taxonomy of Bug Tracking Process Smells: A Quantitative Analysis

Bug tracking is the process of monitoring and reporting malfunctions or issues found in software. While there is no consensus on a formally specified bug tracking process, some certain rules and best practices for an optimal bug tracking process are accepted by many companies and open-source software (OSS) projects. Despite slight variations between different platforms, the primary aim of all these rules and practices is to perform a more efficient bug tracking process. Practitioners’ noncompliance with the best practices not only impedes the benefits of the bug tracking process but also negatively affects the other phases of the life cycle of software development.In this study, based on the results of a multivocal literature review, we analyzed 60 sources in academic and gray literature and propose a taxonomy of 12 bad practices in the bug tracking process, that is bug tracking process smells. To quantitatively analyze these process smells, we inspect bug reports collected from six projects. Among these projects, four of them are Jira-based (MongoDB Core Server, Evergreen, Confluence Server & Data Center, Jira Server & Data Center) and the other two are Bugzilla-based (GCC and Wireshark). We observed that a considerable amount of bug tracking process smells exist in all projects with varying ratios.