Not all bug reopens are negative: A case study on eclipse bug reports

Context: We observed a special type of bug reopen that has no direct impact on the user experience or the normal operation of the system being developed. We refer to these as non-negative bug reopens. Objective: Non-negative bug reopens are novel and somewhat contradictory to popular conceptions. Therefore, we thoroughly explored these phenomena in this study. Method: We begin with a novel approach that preliminarily characterizes non-negative bug reopens. Based on bug reports extracted from Eclipse Bugzilla, we then examined a case study to compare non-negative and regular bug reopens using the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test. Results: The results show that non-negative bug reopens are statistically significantly different than regular bug reopens, based on their survival times and the number of developers involved in the entire debugging process. Conclusion: Taking into account the significant differences, we suggest that the effects of non-negative bug reopens should be considered in future research in related areas, such as bug triage and reopened bug prediction.