Defect location in traditional vs. web applications - An empirical investigation

So far, few attempts were carried out in literature to understand the specific nature of Web bugs and their distribution among the tiers of applications' architecture. In this paper we present an experimental investigation conducted with five pairs of homologous applications (Web and traditional) and 780 real bugs taken from SourceForge aimed at studying the distributions of bugs in Web and traditional applications. The investigation follows a rigorous experimental procedure and it was conducted in the context of three bachelor theses. The study results, although preliminarily, provide a clear-cut empirical evidence that the presentation layer in Web applications is more defect-prone when compared to analogous traditional applications. © 2009 IEEE.