Improving Bug Report Comprehension

Developers need to reason about data in bug reports to diagnose problems and compare proposed solutions. Current bug tracking systems’ interfaces, however, collect and present data as a conversation. Previous work shows that this hinders the ability of users to consult, reason, and analyze information important to resolve bugs. This work implements BugBot, a bug tracking system that eliminates comments as the main component of bug reports, promoting information instead of conversation. An evaluation for 6 months on a group of 9 users finds that BugBot facilitates reasoning about bug report information and improves its archival value.