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Background: Bug fixing lies at the core of most software maintenance efforts. Most prior studies examine the effort needed to fix a bug (fix-effort). However, the effort needed to fix a bug may not correlate with the calendar time needed to fix it (fix-time). For example, the fix-time for bugs with low fix-effort may be long if they are considered to be of low priority.

Aims: We study the fix-time for bugs in large open source projects.

Method: We study the fix-time along three dimensions: (1) the location of the bug (e.g., which component), (2) the reporter of the bug, and (3) the description of the bug. Using these three dimensions and their associated attributes, we examine the fix-time for bugs in two large open source projects: Eclipse and Mozilla, using a random forest classifier.

Results: We show that we can correctly classify ~65% of the time the fix-time for bugs in these projects. We perform a sensitivity analysis to identify the …