The creators of «The secret life of bugs: Going past the errors and omissions in software repositories» noticed that researchers cared a lot about repositories histories as the sole evidence of the software development process, but they questioned if doing this was correctly, considering that there is a lot of things going on that are not recorded on those histories.
To gather information, they studied random Microsoft bug cases.
There were two approaches to study these cases, one of them studied the bug history and the other checked with surveys if the conclusions of the first approach were right by asking professionals in charge of the studied projects.
The study conclusions determined that, electronic records are not trustworthy, there is incomplete information that could mislead actual facts.
My personal thoughts about this is that it is very difficult to have a correctly bug record because you can’t register every effort that each team member made (which translates to knowledge that potentially leads to the solution of the problem), their conversations, experiences and personal activities also helped in the bug solving process and they would not show up in those records.
References
Aranda. J et al. The secret life of bug: Going past the errors and omissions in software repositories. Retrieved from https://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/846/papers/aranda-secretLifeofBugs.pdf
Calidad y pruebas de software 