A contextual approach towards more accurate duplicate bug report detection and ranking

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Hindle, Abram
  • Alipour, A.
  • Stroulia, E.

• The issue-tracking systems used by software projects contain issues, bugs, or tickets written by a wide variety of bug reporters, with different levels of training and knowledge about the system under development. Typically, reporters lack the skills and/or time to search the issue-tracking system for similar issues already reported. As a result, many reports end up referring to the same issue, which effectively makes the bug-report triaging process time consuming and error prone. Many researchers have approached the bug-deduplication problem using off-the-shelf information-retrieval (IR) tools. In this work, we extend the state of the art by investigating how contextual information about software-quality attributes, software-architecture terms, and system-development topics can be exploited to improve bug deduplication. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contextual bug-deduplication method at ranking duplicates on the bug repositories of the Android, Eclipse, Mozilla, and OpenOffice software systems. Based on this experience, we conclude that taking into account domain-specific context can improve IR methods for bug deduplication.

• Date created

  2016

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Issue-tracking systems
  • Bug-tracing systems
  • Duplicate bug reports
  • Triaging
  • Bug deduplication
  • Information retrieval
  • Software context

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-e19m-xv74

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International