Papers › Toward Interactive Bug Reporting for (Android App) End-Users

Toward Interactive Bug Reporting for (Android App) End-Users

21 Sep 2022arXiv:2209.10062links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Yang Song, Junayed Mahmud, Ying Zhou, Oscar Chaparro, Kevin Moran, Andrian Marcus, Denys Poshyvanyk

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Many software bugs are reported manually, particularly bugs that manifest themselves visually in the user interface. End-users typically report these bugs via app reviewing websites, issue trackers, or in-app built-in bug reporting tools, if available. While these systems have various features that facilitate bug reporting (e.g., textual templates or forms), they often provide limited guidance, concrete feedback, or quality verification to end-users, who are often inexperienced at reporting bugs and submit low-quality bug reports that lead to excessive developer effort in bug report management tasks. We propose an interactive bug reporting system for end-users (Burt), implemented as a task-oriented chatbot. Unlike existing bug reporting systems, Burt provides guided reporting of essential bug report elements (i.e., the observed behavior, expected behavior, and steps to reproduce the bug), instant quality verification, and graphical suggestions for these elements. We implemented a version of Burt for Android and conducted an empirical evaluation study with end-users, who reported 12 bugs from six Android apps studied in prior work. The reporters found that Burt's guidance and automated suggestions/clarifications are useful and Burt is easy to use. We found that Burt reports contain higher-quality information than reports collected via a template-based bug reporting system. Improvements to Burt, informed by the reporters, include support for various wordings to describe bug report elements and improved quality verification. Our work marks an important paradigm shift from static to interactive bug reporting for end-users.

PaperPDFCode

Code

sea-lab-wm/burt officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections