A Bug Report Analysis and Search Tool

Software maintenance and evolution are characterised by their huge cost and slow speed of implementation. Yet they are inevitable activities – almost all software that is useful and successful stimulates user-generated requests for change and improvements. A set of studies has stated along the years that software maintenance and evolution is the most expensive phase of software development, taking up to 90% of the total costs. All those characteristics from software maintenance lead the academia and industry to constantly investigate new solutions to reduce costs in such phase. In this context, Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a set of activities and standards for managing and evolving software. For all these activities it has been proposed different tools, such as version control systems and bug trackers. However, some issues may arise due to these tools usage, such as the dynamic assignment of a developer to a bug report or the bug report duplication problem. In this sense, this work investigates the problem of bug report duplication emerged by the use of bug trackers on software development projects.