  Background: Bugs and bug management consumes a significant amount of time and
effort from software development organizations. A reduction in bugs can
significantly improve the capacity for new feature development. Aims: We
categorize and visualize dimensions of bug reports to identify accruing
technical debt. This evidence can serve practitioners and decision makers not
only as an argumentative basis for steering improvement efforts, but also as a
starting point for root cause analysis, reducing overall bug inflow. Method: We
implemented a tool, MultiDimEr, that analyzes and visualizes bug reports. The
tool was implemented and evaluated at Ericsson. Results: We present our
preliminary findings using the MultiDimEr for bug analysis, where we
successfully identified components generating most of the bugs and bug trends
within certain components. Conclusions: By analyzing the dimensions provided by
MultiDimEr, we show that classifying and visualizing bug reports in different
dimensions can stimulate discussions around bug hot spots as well as validating
the accuracy of manually entered bug report attributes used in technical debt
measurements such as fault slip through.
