The Firefox Temporal Defect Dataset

The bug tracking repositories of software projects capture initial defect (bug) reports and the history of interactions among developers, testers, and customers. Extracting and mining information from these repositories is time consuming and daunting. Researchers have focused mostly on analyzing the frequency of the occurrence of defects and their attributes (e.g., The number of comments and lines of code changed, count of developers). However, the counting process eliminates information about the temporal alignment of events leading to changes in the attributes count. Software quality teams could plan and prioritize their work more efficiently if they were aware of these temporal sequences and knew their frequency of occurrence. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset mined from the Fire fox bug repository (Bugzilla) which contains information about the temporal alignment of developer interactions. Our dataset covers eight years of data from the Fire fox project on activities throughout the project's lifecycle. Some of these activities have not been reported in frequency-based or other temporal datasets. The dataset we mined from the Fire fox project contains new activities, such as reporter experience, file exchange events, code-review process activities, and setting of milestones. We believe that this new dataset will improve analysis of bug reports and enable mining of temporal relationships so that practitioners can enhance their bug-fixing process.