Debt-Prone Bugs: Technical Debt in Software Maintenance
  Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In
practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule.
Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release
schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we
propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software
maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs,
reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to
examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We investigate the
correlation between debt-prone bugs and the product quality. For a product
under development, we build prediction models based on historical products to
predict the time cost of fixing bugs. The result shows that identifying
debt-prone bugs can assist in monitoring and improving software quality.
