Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

6-2012

Abstract

For a large and evolving software system, the project team could receive a large number of bug reports. Locating the source code files that need to be changed in order to fix the bugs is a challenging task. Once a bug report is received, it is desirable to automatically point out to the files that developers should change in order to fix the bug. In this paper, we propose BugLocator, an information retrieval based method for locating the relevant files for fixing a bug. BugLocator ranks all files based on the textual similarity between the initial bug report and the source code using a revised Vector Space Model (rVSM), taking into consideration information about similar bugs that have been fixed before. We perform large-scale experiments on four open source projects to localize more than 3,000 bugs. The results show that BugLocator can effectively locate the files where the bugs should be fixed. For example, relevant buggy files for 62.60% Eclipse 3.1 bugs are ranked in the top ten among 12,863 files. Our experiments also show that BugLocator outperforms existing state-of-the-art bug localization methods.

Keywords

bug localization, bug reports, feature location, information retrieval

Discipline

Information Security | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE 2012: 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, Zurich, June 2-9

First Page

14

Last Page

24

ISBN

9781467310659

Identifier

10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227210

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Pistacaway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227210

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