Usage, usefulness and quality of defect reports: an industrial case study

In the context of an industry-academia collaboration in the scope of test process improvement, there was a need to assess the usage, usefulness and quality of defect reports. The objective was to assess the extent to which each field of a defect report (e.g., product name, version number) is read/used by developers, ensuring that efforts spent into writing those fields are worthwhile, and also to pinpoint improvement areas in defect reports to increase developers' effectiveness in fixing defects. To address those needs, we conducted a questionnaire survey which gathered input from 38 software developers in the context of a large Turkish software and systems company providing global solutions in the areas of defense and IT. Analysis of survey results helped us to determine the usage and usefulness of various defect report fields and also to pinpoint the necessary improvement areas in defect reports, out of which an improvement effort has already started.