An Empirical Study of Bugs in Software Build System

• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.e97.d.1769
• Publication Date: 2014-07-01T14:44:51Z
• Authors: Xin XIA; Xiaozhen ZHOU; David LO; Xiaoqiong ZHAO; Ye WANG
• Keywords: Executable; Software bug; Codebase

A build system converts source code, libraries and other data into executable programs by orchestrating the execution of compilers tools. The whole building process is managed a software system, such as Make, Ant, CMake, Maven, Scons, QMake. Many studies have investigated bugs fixes in several systems, but to our best knowledge, none focused on systems. One significant feature systems that they should work various platforms, i.e., operating (e.g., Windows, Linux), development environments Eclipse, Visual Studio), programming languages C, C++, Java, C#), so study deserves special consideration. In this paper, we perform an empirical We analyze four CMake QMake, which are typical widely-used can be used C++ investigate their bug database code repositories, randomly sample set reports (800 totally, 199, 250, 200, 151 for respectively), manually assign them categories. find 21.35% belong external interface category, 18.23% logic 12.86% configuration category. also relationship between categories severities, fixing time, number comments.