Does your Bug Tracking tool suit your needs? A Study on Open Source Bug Tracking tools Sai Anirudh Karre 1 , Anveshi Shukla 2 and Y. Raghu Reddy 3 Software Engineering Research Center International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India sai.anirudh@research.iiit.ac.in anveshi.shukla@research.iiit.ac.in raghu.reddy@iiit.ac.in Abstract. Bug tracking tools are vital for managing bugs in any open source as well as proprietary commercial projects. Considering the signif- icance of using an appropriate bug tracking tool, we assess the features offered by 31 open source bug tracking tools and their significance of us- age in open source projects. We have categorized these tools into different classes based on their features. We have also conducted a developer sur- vey by working with open source software practitioners to understand the effectiveness of these tools in their day-to-day software development. We also explored StackOverFlow - a developer Q&A forum to understand the developer experiences and challenges while using open source bug tracking tools. Our observations generated encouraging results that can used as a recommendation guide for open source software community to choose the best bug tracking tool based on their functional needs. Addi- tionally, we have identified few features that are needed but not offered by most of these bug tracking tools. Keywords: Bug Tracking, Bug Report, Cluster, Open Source Software, Software Quality 1 Introduction Open source software (OSS) development is a large team activity contributed by worldwide developer community. This community predominantly constitutes students and freelance software practitioners with various skill sets across the world. Almost all open source software teams depend on freeware tools to plan, code, test, track-report-fix bugs and market product(s). With huge end user client base, software production became easier with open source license 1 . For example, Apache HTTP Server project has huge client base as well as stroner developer base. It is the world’s leading web server software since its origin in 1995. NetCraft 2015 Web Server Survey estimated that apache was serving 50.91% of all active websites along with 49.19% of top servers across all domains. 1 https://opensource.org/licenses arXiv:1706.06799v1 [cs.SE] 21 Jun 2017