Analysis of the textual content of mined open source usability defect reports

Writing a good usability defect report can be a tedious task, especially in identifying what important information should be included, and capturing the attention of software developers to fix them. This paper is a continuity of our previous studies investigating software development practitioners' day-to-day practices when dealing with usability defects. In this study, we mined 377 developer-tagged usability defect reports from Mozilla Thunderbird, Firefox for Android and Eclipse Platform to confirm what software development practitioners claimed to provide when reporting usability defects. We looked for the presence of key defect attributes - steps to reproduce, impact, software context, expected output, actual output, assumed causes, solution proposal and supplementary information. In addition, we analyzed the trend of different types of usability defects, correlation between usability defects and defect severity, and failure qualifier. Our findings demonstrate a mismatch between what software development practitioners claimed to provide when reporting usability defects, and the information that actually appears in the defect reports. The results of our research have important implications for software defect reporting, especially in designing more effective mechanisms for reporting usability defects.