Towards understanding bugs in an open source cloud management stack: An empirical study of OpenStack software bugs

摘要

Cloud management stack (CMS) provides convenience for organizations in managing their cloud platforms. CMS software is complex and bugs in it can cause serious damage to the cloud environment. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of CMS bugs can help developers detect and fix them. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of several key characteristics of bugs in OpenStack - the most popular open source CMS. Our study computes general statistics for about 50K OpenStack bugs, including the evolution of bugs, the distribution of bugs, and the duration of bugs. We then selected 579 bugs for an in-depth study. In particular, we study the input factors for triggering the bugs, the consequences of the bugs, and how the bugs are fixed. The findings of this study provide a set of lessons learned and guidance to aid practitioners and researchers to better handle bugs in CMS software. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.