Masao Ohira

Predicting Re-opened Bugs: A Case Study on the Eclipse Project

Bug fixing accounts for a large amount of the software maintenance resources. Generally, bugs are reported, fixed, verified and closed. However, in some cases bugs have to be re-opened. Re-opened bugs increase maintenance costs, degrade the overall user-perceived quality of the software and lead to unnecessary rework by busy practitioners. In this paper, we study and predict re-opened bugs through a case study on the Eclipse project. We structure our study along 4 dimensions: 1) the work habits dimension (e.g., the weekday on which the bug was initially closed on), 2) the bug report dimension (e.g., the component in which the bug was found) 3) the bug fix dimension (e.g., the amount of time it took to perform the initial fix) and 4) the team dimension (e.g., the experience of the bug fixer). Our case study on the Eclipse Platform 3.0 project shows that the comment and description text, the time it took to fix the bug, and the component the bug was found in are the most important factors in determining whether a bug will be re-opened. Based on these dimensions we create decision trees that predict whether a bug will be re-opened after its closure. Using a combination of our dimensions, we can build explainable prediction models that can achieve 62.9% precision and 84.5% recall when predicting whether a bug will be re-opened.

A framework that supports collective creativity in design using visual images

The goal of our research is to develop computer systems that support designers’ collective creativity; such systems support individual creative aspects in design through the use of representations created by others in the community. We have developed two systems, IAM-eMMa and EVIDII, that both aim at supporting designers in finding visual images that would be useful for their creative design task. IAMeMMa uses knowledge-based rules, which are constructed by other designers, to retrieve images related to a design task and infers the underlying “rationale” when a designer chooses one of the images. EVIDII allows designers to associate affective words and images, and then shows several visual representations of the relationships among designers, images and words. By observing designers interacting with the two systems, we have identified that systems for supporting collective creativity need to be based on design knowledge that (1) is contextualized, (2) is respectable and trustful, and (3) enables “appropriation” of a design task.

An analysis method for improving a bug modification process in open source software development

As open source software products have evolved over time to satisfy a variety of demands from increasing users, they have become large and complex in general. Open source developers often face with challenges in fixing a considerable amount of bugs which are reported into a bug tracking system on a daily basis. As a result, the mean time to resolve bugs has been protracted in these days. In order to reduce the mean time to resolve bugs, managers/leaders of open source projects need to identify and understand the bottleneck of a bug modification process in their own projects. In this paper, we propose an analysis method which represents a bug modification process using a bug tracking system as a state transition diagram and then calculates the amount of time required to transit between states. We have conducted a case study using Firefox and Apache project data to confirm the usefulness of the analysis method. From the results of the case study, we have found that the method helped to reveal that both of the projects took a lot of time to verify results of bug modifications by developers.

A Quantitative Evaluation on the Software Use Experience with Electroencephalogram

In usability testing, experimenters need to perform a pre-training, so as to control software-use experiences of subjects. The pre-training in usability testing is very important because subjects’ software-use experiences have a large effect on a result of a subjective evaluation of software. This paper aims to evaluate the software-use experiences quantitatively using EEG. We have conducted experiments to observe the relationships between subjects’ software-use experiences and EEG in using software. As a result, we found that there was a significant difference between them.

Toward Constructing an Electroencephalogram Measurement Method for Usability Evaluation

This paper describes our pilot study toward constructing an electroencephalogram (EEG) measurement method for usability evaluation. The measurement method consists of two steps: (1) measuring EEGs of subjects for several tens of seconds after events or tasks that are targets to evaluate, and (2) analyzing how much components of the alpha and/or beta rhythm are contained in the measured EEGs. However, there only exists an empirical rule on measurement time length of EEGs for usability evaluation. In this paper, we conduct an experiment to reveal the optimal time length of EEGs for usability evaluation by analyzing changes of EEGs over time. From the results of the experiments, we have found that the time length suitable for usability evaluation was more than 0~56.32 seconds.

An Analysis of Gradual Patch Application: A Better Explanation of Patch Acceptance

Patch submission has been known as one of the most important activities to sustain the open source software (OSS). The patch archive can be analyzed to procure many benefit cognizance for supporting the OSS project works. The recent models and methods that analyze the patches acceptance are quite rack of comprehensive; hence, complex activities such as a committer portioning the Passed QA patch out and accept are still excluded from the analysis. Therefore, the results derived from those methods would be inadequate to conclude the actual patch acceptance. In this research, we introduce an algorithm for analyzing patch acceptance including the partial and gradually accepted conditions. Validating our algorithm, we present our methods for indicating the partial and gradual application of the Passed QA patch between either mailing list and SVN or Bugzilla and CVS which are the commonly deployed patch-activities related system. We studied on two well known OSS projects; Apache HTTP and Eclipse Platform. We obtained a fascinating conclusion that larger patches have more confident to be accepted than the smaller contradicted to other analysis that came from the recent methods.

Second International Workshop on Supporting Knowledge Collaboration in Software Development (KCSD2006)

The creation of modern software systems requires knowledge from a wide range of domains: application domains, computer hardware and operating systems, algorithms, programming languages, vast amount of component libraries, development environments, the history of the software system, and users. Because few software developers have all the required knowledge, the development of software is no longer confined to an individual but has to rely on distributed cognition by reaching into a complex and networked world of information and computer mediated collaboration. Knowledge collaboration has thus become an important aspect of software development.

Community search: a collaborative searching web application with a user ranking system

People are using search engine in daily life. But most of the tools that we have today treat information-seeking tasks as a transient activity. In this research paper we introduce a web application system that provides collaborative function and experts finding system. We develop a system that will help user to organize search result and to do the collaboration with others. With the new iterative algorithm, users will also gain more percentage of needed result and the system will be able to suggest the experts related to the search keyword.

A time-lag analysis for improving communication among OSS developers

In the open source software (OSS) development environment, a communication time-lag among developers is more likely to happen due to time differences among locations of developers and differences of working hours for OSS development. A means for effective communication among OSS developers has been increasingly demanded in recent years, since an OSS product and its users requires a prompt response to issues such as defects and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose an analysis method for observing the time-lag of communication among developers in an OSS project and then facilitating the communication.

Effects of a synchronized scoring interface on musical quality

Collaborative music composition among casual users has the potential of creating advanced music that cannot be composed by a single user since the users can complement a shortage of musical knowledge each other. Although some studies have proposed music composition interfaces which synchronously visualize the composition data in real time, their effects on the quality of music are not still clear. As a result of our experiment, we found that the EMD value (0 is the best score) in using the interface Marble we proposed was lower than that of asynchronous music composition systems and Marble has increased the total number of utterances among users.