Poster: An Initial Characterization of Bug-Injecting Development Sessions

Even experienced developers rigorously testing their code and using state of the art tools and practices, inject every now and then bugs into the code. There is a huge amount of literature about the characterization of such bugs including the effectiveness of the reports and the fixes, the time required to fix them, etc. Existing works have already identified several factors considered to influence directly the bug injection. However, there is no support for the claims made so far using data coming from industrial, buginjecting development sessions. This paper aims at filling this gap by analyzing industrial bug-injecting development sessions from several points of view. It investigates 49 bug-injecting development sessions evaluating and discussing three alleged, developers-centered main causes of bug injection: expertise, knowledge of code, and distraction. Additionally, the paper provides insights into the complete lifetime of bugs from injection to the fix and discusses implications for bug prediction.