An Empirical Study of the Relationship between the Frequency of Crash Reports and the Linkage with Bug Reports

Abstract

This paper studies how a developer uses crash reports sent from users in order to encourage the users to send the crash reports. This paper could contribute to what the developers understand the fault occurrence in user environment more precisely (for developers) and what the faults that users suffer would be preferentially addressed (for users). We analyze the relationship between the frequency of the crash reports in a crash repository and the probability of linkages of the crash reports and issue reports in Bugzilla. The results using the dataset collected from Firefox show some findings such as 1) 63% of crash reports are linked to issue reports and 2) 90% of the linked crash reports are linked to issue reports up to the 1,000 crash reports.