Open AccessAre Similar Bugs Fixed with Similar Change Operations? An Empirical Study
Author(s) -
Lili Bo,
Xuanrui Zhu,
Xiaobing Sun,
Zhen Ni,
Bin Li
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
chinese journal of electronics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.267
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 2075-5597
pISSN - 1022-4653
DOI - 10.1049/cje.2020.10.010
Subject(s) - computer science , software bug , process (computing) , statement (logic) , software , security bug , empirical research , software engineering , software evolution , software regression , programming language , software development , software quality , computer security , software security assurance , software construction , statistics , mathematics , information security , security service , political science , law
Fine‐grained change operations can help software developers fix software bugs more accurately and efficiently. However, the current fine‐grained change operations are only used in specific fixing process, such as fixing of If statement . In this paper, we conducted an empirical study to explore the fine‐grained change operations for bug fixing. Based on the Mozilla bug data, we examined whether similar bugs are fixed with similar change operations. The results show that: First, for bug reports with similar descriptions or bug‐fix commits with similar descriptions, their corresponding fine‐grained change operations are not related; Second, in the case where the descriptions of both bug reports and bug‐fix commits are similar, the fine‐grained change operations in patch code are not related; Third, by classifying bug reports, we find that the change operations in the same bug report category are similar; Finally, by analyzing the fine‐grained change operations for each bug, we present some combined patterns that are often used together.