MultiDimEr: a multi-dimensional bug analyzEr

Background: Bugs and bug management consumes a significant amount of time and effort from software development organizations. A reduction in bugs can significantly improve the capacity for new feature development. Aims: We categorize and visualize dimensions of bug reports to identify accruing technical debt. This evidence can serve practitioners and decision makers not only as an argumentative basis for steering improvement efforts, but also as a starting point for root cause analysis, reducing overall bug inflow. Method: We implemented a tool, MultiDimEr, that analyzes and visualizes bug reports. The tool was implemented and evaluated at Ericsson. Results: We present our preliminary findings using the MultiDimEr for bug analysis, where we successfully identified components generating most of the bugs and bug trends within certain components. Conclusions: By analyzing the dimensions provided by MultiDimEr, we show that classifying and visualizing bug reports in different dimensions can stimulate discussions around bug hot spots as well as validating the accuracy of manually entered bug report attributes used in technical debt measurements such as fault slip through.