Bug Prioritization to Facilitate Bug Report Triage

• Published in: Journal of computer science and technology Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 397 - 412
• Main Authors: Kanwal, Jaweria, Maqbool, Onaiza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.03.2012; Springer Nature B.V; Department of Computer Science,Quaid-i-Azam University,Islamabad,Pakistan
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Analysis; Artificial Intelligence; Bayesian analysis; Bayes算法; Classifiers; Computer Science; Construction; Data mining; Data Structures and Information Theory; Debugging; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Open source software; Priorities; Recall; Regular Paper; Software Engineering; Studies; Support vector machines; SVM; Texts; Theory of Computation; 优先次序; 使用精度; 分流; 支持向量机; 文本特征; 错误报告; bug triaging; bug priority; mining bug repositories; classification; evaluation measures
• ISSN: 1000-9000; 1860-4749
• DOI: 10.1007/s11390-012-1230-3

The large number of new bug reports received in bug repositories of software systems makes their management a challenging task.Handling these reports manually is time consuming,and often results in delaying the resolution of important bugs.To address this issue,a recommender may be developed which automatically prioritizes the new bug reports.In this paper,we propose and evaluate a classification based approach to build such a recommender.We use the Na¨ ve Bayes and Support Vector Machine （SVM） classifiers,and present a comparison to evaluate which classifier performs better in terms of accuracy.Since a bug report contains both categorical and text features,another evaluation we perform is to determine the combination of features that better determines the priority of a bug.To evaluate the bug priority recommender,we use precision and recall measures and also propose two new measures,Nearest False Negatives （NFN） and Nearest False Positives （NFP）,which provide insight into the results produced by precision and recall.Our findings are that the results of SVM are better than the Na¨ ve Bayes algorithm for text features,whereas for categorical features,Na¨ ve Bayes performance is better than SVM.The highest accuracy is achieved with SVM when categorical and text features are combined for training.