Understanding Key Features of High-Impact Bug Reports

Nowadays, software projects are receiving bug reports on a daily basis. Developers cannot treat all the bugs in the same priority since some bugs can significantly affect software development process and the quality of products. Previous studies defined these bugs as High Impact Bug (HIB) and they found that HIB should be fixed quicker than other bugs in software development. However, fixing a HIB sometimes become complicated because the low-quality bug reports can be delay the bug fixing. In this study, we investigate what information is essential when reporting a HIB report. As a case study, we manually examine the HIB reports and perform both qualitative and quantitative analysis in Apache Camel project. Our main findings include: (1) we find four types of features are the most requested information from developers when they fix HIB, (2) the requested additional information significantly influences bug fixing time.