Raising the Quality of Bug Reports by Predicting Software Defect Indicators

The descriptive quality of bug reports is one of the essential parts of defect management. Sometimes they provide inadequate or incorrect data about software problems, which can lead to incomplete defect fixing or omission of serious defects. Therefore, it is vital to evaluate and improve the quality of bug reports. This paper proposes an approach that helps to resolve this problem by predicting various indicators. The values of these indicators allow QA engineers to evaluate the quality of defect description and correct it in a suitable way. This paper also introduces Nostradamus, a new open source tool built to implement the approach. The tool uses machine learning techniques to analyze the data stored in software defect repositories and evaluates the interdependence of defect attributes, including such a crucial element as a defect description. This paper describes the approach, the tool that is based on it and the typical use cases.