BURT: A Chatbot for Interactive Bug Reporting

Abstract: This paper introduces BURT, a web-based chatbot for interactive reporting of Android app bugs. BURT is designed to assist Android app end-users in reporting high-quality defect information using an interactive interface. BURT guides the users in reporting essential bug report elements, i.e., the observed behavior, expected behavior, and the steps to reproduce the bug. It verifies the quality of the text written by the user and provides instant feedback. In addition, BURT provides graphical suggestions that the users can choose as alternatives to textual descriptions. We empirically evaluated BURT, asking end-users to report bugs from six Android apps. The reporters found that BURT’s guidance and automated suggestions and clarifications are useful and BURT is easy to use. BURT is an open-source tool, available at github.com/sea-lab-wm/burt/tree/tool-demo. A video showing the full capabilities of BURT can be found at https://youtu.be/SyfOXpHYGRo.