Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2013

Abstract

Build system converts source code, libraries and other data into executable programs by orchestrating the execution of compilers and other tools. The whole building process is managed by a software build system, such as Make, Ant, CMake, Maven, Scons, and QMake. The reliability of software build systems would affect the reliability of the build process. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on bugs in software build systems. We analyze four software build systems, Ant, Maven, CMake and QMake, which are four typical and widely-used software build systems, and can be used to build Java, C, C++ systems. We investigate their bug database and code repositories, randomly sample a set of bug reports and their fixes (800 bugs reports totally, and 199, 250, 200, and 151 bug reports for Ant, Maven, CMake and QMake, respectively), and manually assign them into various categories. We find that 21.35% of the bugs belong to the external interface category, 18.23% of the bugs belong to the logic category, and 12.86% of the bugs belong to the configuration category. We also investigate the relationship between bug categories and bug severities.

Keywords

Bug Category, Empirical Study, Software Build System

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2013 13th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2013): Proceedings: 29-30 July 2013, Nanjing, China

First Page

200

Last Page

203

ISBN

9781479905003

Identifier

10.1109/QSIC.2013.60

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/QSIC.2013.60

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