Bug reports are artifacts that track the defects of software systems. In software maintenance research area, there has been a bunch of research work addressing problem of bug reports in recent years.
Bugzilla is one of the most popular bug reporting system. For the sake of its popularity and open-source feature, the data for research are largely provided by Bugzilla.
The diagram below shows the major categories of work in this area. The left-bottom corner is a sample bug report from Bugzilla.
Previous research has been mainly focused on detecting duplicates, categorizing bug reports, statistical studies, and attempting to generate summary for bug reports.
Techniques that are used are mainly related with natural language process. The software engineering technique has not been used very much, such as building relation between bug reports and code, between bug reports and design/security, etc.