Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

8-2014

Abstract

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities. These systems contain different categories of issue reports such as bug, request for improvement (RFE), documentation, refactoring, task etc. While logging issue reports into a tracking system, reporters can indicate the category of the reports. Herzig et al. Recently reported that more than 40% of issue reports are given wrong categories in issue tracking systems. Among issue reports that are marked as bugs, more than 30% of them are not bug reports. The misclassification of issue reports can adversely affects developers as they then need to manually identify the categories of various issue reports. To address this problem, in this paper we propose an automated technique that reclassifies an issue report into an appropriate category. Our approach extracts various feature values from a bug report and predicts if a bug report needs to be reclassified and its reclassified category. We have evaluated our approach to reclassify more than 7,000 bug reports from HTTP Client, Jackrabbit, Lucene-Java, Rhino, and Tomcat 5 into 1 out of 13 categories. Our experiments show that we can achieve a weighted precision, recall, and F1 (F-measure) score in the ranges of 0.58-0.71, 0.61-0.72, and 0.57-0.71 respectively. In terms of F1, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall, our approach can substantially outperform several baselines by 28.88%-416.66%.

Keywords

Fine-Grained, Issue Reports, Reclassification

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2014 19th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS): August 4-7, Tianjin, Proceedings

First Page

126

Last Page

135

ISBN

9781479954810

Identifier

10.1109/ICECCS.2014.25

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECCS.2014.25

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