An empirical study of supplementary patches in open source projects

Abstract

Developers occasionally make more than one patch to fix a bug. The related patches sometimes are intentionally separated, but unintended omission errors require supplementary patches. Several change recommendation systems have been suggested based on clone analysis, structural dependency, and historical change coupling in order to reduce or prevent incomplete patches. However, very few studies have examined the reason that incomplete patches occur and how real-world omission errors could be reduced. This paper systematically studies a group of bugs that were fixed more than once in open source projects in order to understand the characteristics of incomplete patches. Our study on Eclipse JDT core, Eclipse SWT, Mozilla, and Equinox p2 showed that a significant portion of the resolved bugs require more than one attempt to fix. Compared to single-fix bugs, the multi-fix bugs did not have a lower quality of bug reports, but more attribute changes (i.e., cc'ed developers or title) were made to the multi-fix bugs than to the single-fix bugs. Multi-fix bugs are more likely to have high severity levels than single-fix bugs. Hence, more developers have participated in discussions about multi-fix bugs compared to single-fix bugs. Multi-fix bugs take more time to resolve than single-fix bugs do. Incomplete patches are longer and more scattered, and they are related to more files than regular patches are. Our manual inspection showed that the causes of incomplete patches were diverse, including missed porting updates, incorrect handling of conditional statements, and incomplete refactoring. Our investigation showed that only 7 % to 17 % of supplementary patches had content similar to their initial patches, which implies that supplementary patch locations cannot be predicted by code clone analysis alone. Furthermore, 16 % to 46 % of supplementary patches were beyond the scope of the immediate structural dependency of their initial patch locations. Historical co-change patterns also showed low precision in predicting supplementary patch locations. Code clones, structural dependencies, and historical co-change analyses predicted different supplementary patch locations, and there was little overlap between them. Combining these analyses did not cover all supplementary patch locations. The present study investigates the characteristics of incomplete patches and multi-fix bugs, which have not been systematically examined in previous research. We reveal that predicting supplementary patch is a difficult problem that existing change recommendation approaches could not cover. New type of approaches should be developed and validated on a supplementary patch data set, which developers failed to make the complete patches at once in practice.