Challenges and Issues of Mining Crash Reports

Automatic crash reporting tools built in many software systems allow software practitioners to understand the origin of field crashes and help them prioritise field crashes or bugs, locate erroneous files, and/or predict bugs and crash occurrences in subsequent versions of the software systems. In this paper, after illustrating the structure of crash reports in Mozilla, we discuss some techniques for mining information from crash reports, and highlight the challenges and issues of these techniques. Our aim is to raise the awareness of the research community about issues that may bias research results obtained from crash reports and provide some guidelines to address certain challenges related to mining crash reports.