BugMaps-Granger: A Tool for Causality Analysis between Source Code Metrics and Bugs

Despite the increasing number of bug analysis tools for exploring bugs in software systems, there are no tools supporting the investigation of causality relationships between internal quality metrics and bugs. In this paper, we propose an extension of the BugMaps tool called BugMaps-Granger that allows the analysis of source code properties that caused bugs. For this purpose, we relied on Granger Causality Test to evaluate whether past changes to a given time series of source code metrics can be used to forecast changes in a time series of defects. Our tool extracts source code versions from version control platforms, generates source code metrics and defects time series, computes Granger, and provides interactive visualizations for causal analysis of bugs. We also provide a case study in order to evaluate the tool.