An Empirical Study of the Impact of Developer Proficiency on Bug fixing Efficiency and Accuracy

Abstract

In the modern software systems’ evolution, solving bugs efficiently and reducing the life cycle of a bug has become increasingly essential. The developer’s proficiency has a huge impact in this case. So our target is to study the effect of developer’s profi ciency on bug fixing efficiency and accuracy. We conducted an empirical study on a bug repository of an open-source project containing approximately 42574 issues. We proposed six factors, Total number of solved tasks, Mean time to solve a task, Task reopen ratio, Total number of fixed bugs, Mean time to fix a bug, and Bug reopen ratio for calculating developers’ proficiency value. For validating our metric we also im plemented Structural Equation Model (SEM) in our study. The analysis of your data revealed that the selected factors do indeed impact a developer’s proficiency. Addition ally, assigning bugs to proficient developers was found to reduce the bug life cycle. We also observed that, highly proficient developers may not always exhibit a high level of accuracy. Therefore, to effectively reduce the bug life cycle, it is crucial to focus on both the proficiency and accuracy levels of developers