Fixing Bug Reporting for Mobile and GUI-Based Applications

Smartphones and tablets have established themselves as mainstays in the modern computing landscape. It is conceivable that in the near future such devices may supplant laptops and desktops, becoming many users primary means of carrying out typical computer assisted tasks. In turn, this means that mobile applications will continue on a trajectory to becoming more complex, and the primary focus of millions of developers worldwide. In order to properly create and maintain these “apps” developers will need support, especially with regard to the prompt confirmation and resolution of bug reports. Unfortunately, current issue tracking systems typically only implement collection of coarse grained natural language descriptions, and lack features to facilitate reporters including important information in their reports. This illustrates the lexical information gap that exists in current bug reporting systems for mobile and GUI-based apps. This paper outlines promising preliminary work towards addressing this problem and proposes a comprehensive research program which aims to implement new bug reporting mechanisms and examine the impact that they might have on related software maintenance tasks.