One of the primary mechanisms by which developers receive feedback about in-field failures of software from users is through bug reports. Unfortunately, the quality of manually written bug reports can vary widely due to the effort required to include essential pieces of information, such as detailed reproduction steps (S2Rs). Despite the difficulty faced by reporters, few existing bug reporting systems attempt to offer automated assistance to users in crafting easily readable, and conveniently reproducible bug reports. To address the need for proactive bug reporting systems that actively aid the user in capturing crucial information, we introduce a novel bug reporting approach calledEBug.EBugassists reporters in writing S2Rs for mobile applications by analyzing natural language information entered by reporters in real-time, and linking this data to information extracted via a combination of static and dynamic program analyses. As reporters write S2Rs,EBugis capable of automatically suggesting potential future steps using predictive models trained on realistic app usages. To evaluateEBug, we performed two user studies based on 20 failures from 11 real-world apps. The empirical studies involved ten participants that submitted ten bug reports each and ten developers that reproduced the submitted bug reports. In the studies, we found that reporters were able to construct bug reports 31%fasterwithEBugas compared to the state-of-the-art bug reporting system used as a baseline.EBug's reports were alsomore reproduciblewith respect to the ones generated with the baseline. Furthermore, we comparedEBug's prediction models to other predictive modeling approaches and found that, overall, the predictive models of our approach outperformed the baseline approaches. Our results are promising and demonstrate the feasibility and potential benefits provided by proactively assistive bug reporting systems.

One of the key tasks related to ensuring mobile app quality is the reporting, management, and resolution of bug reports. As such, researchers have committed considerable resources toward automating various tasks of the bug management process for mobile apps, such as reproduction and triaging. However, the success of these automated approaches is largely dictated by the characteristics and properties of the bug reports they operate upon. As such, understanding mobile app bug reports is imperative to drive the continued advancement of report management techniques. While prior studies have examined high-level statistics of large sets of reports, we currently lack an in-depth investigation of how the information typically reported in mobile app issue trackers relates to the specific details generally required to reproduce the underlying failures. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of 180 re-producible bug reports systematically mined from Android apps on GitHub and investigate how the information contained in the reports relates to the task of reproducing the described bugs. In our analysis, we focus on three pieces of information: the environment needed to reproduce the bug report, the steps to reproduce (S2Rs), and the observed behavior. Focusing on this information, we characterize failure types, identify the modality used to report the information, and characterize the quality of the information within the reports. We find that bugs are reported in a multi-modal fashion, the environment is not always provided, and S2Rs often contain missing or non-specific enough information. These findings carry with them important implications on automated bug reproduction techniques as well as automated bug report management approaches more generally.

Software maintenance constitutes a large portion of the software development lifecycle. To carry out maintenance tasks, developers often need to understand and reproduce bug reports. As such, there has been increasing research activity coalescing around the notion of automating various activities related to bug reporting. A sizable portion of this research interest has focused on the domain of mobile apps. However, as research around mobile app bug reporting progresses, there is a clear need for a manually vetted and reproducible set of real-world bug reports that can serve as a benchmark for future work. This paper presents AndroR2: a dataset of 90 manually reproduced bug reports for Android apps listed on Google Play and hosted on GitHub, systematically collected via an in-depth analysis of 459 reports extracted from the GitHub issue tracker. For each reproduced report, AndroR2 includes the original bug report, an apk file for the buggy version of the app, an executable reproduction script, and metadata regarding the quality of the reproduction steps associated with the original report. We believe that the AndroR2 dataset can be used to facilitate research in automatically analyzing, understanding, reproducing, localizing, and fixing bugs for mobile applications as well as other software maintenance activities more broadly.