Reproducibility of Software Bugs Basic Concepts and Automatic Classification

Understanding software bugs and their effects is important in several engineering activities, including testing, debugging, and design of fault containment or tolerance methods. Dealing with hard-to-reproduce failures requires a deep comprehension of the mechanisms leading from bug activation to software failure. This chapter surveys taxonomies and recent studies about bugs from the perspective of their reproducibility, providing insights into the process of bug manifestation and the factors influencing it. These insights are based on the analysis of thousands of bug reports of a widely used open source software, namely MySQL Server. Bug reports are automatically classified according to reproducibility characteristics, pro- viding figures about the proportion of bugs hardly reproducible, about their features, and about their evolution over releases.