Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2014
Abstract
Bug localization refers to the process of identifying source code files that contain defects from descriptions of these defects which are typically contained in bug reports. There have been many bug localization techniques proposed in the literature. However, often it is hard to compare these techniques since different evaluation datasets are used. At times the datasets are not made publicly available and thus it is difficult to reproduce reported results. Furthermore, some techniques are only evaluated on small datasets and thus it is not clear whether the results are generalizable. Thus, there is a need for a platform that allows various techniques to be compared with one another on a common pool containing a large number of bug reports with known defective source code files. In this paper, we address this need by proposing our Bug lOcalization experimental plATform (BOAT). BOAT is an extensible web application that contains thousands of bug reports with known defective source code files. Researchers can create accounts in BOAT, upload executables of their bug localization techniques, and see how these techniques perform in comparison with techniques uploaded by other researchers, with respect to some standard evaluation measures. BOAT is already preloaded with several bug localization techniques and thus researchers can directly compare their newly proposed techniques against these existing techniques. BOAT has been made available online since October 2013, and researchers could access the platform at: http://www.vlis.zju.edu.cn/blp.
Keywords
Benchmark, BOAT, Bug localization, Experimental platform
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
ICSE Companion 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering: May 31-June 7, Hyderabad, India
First Page
572
Last Page
575
ISBN
9781450327688
Identifier
10.1145/2591062.2591066
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
WANG, Xinyu; LO, David; XIA, Xin; WANG, Xingen; KOCHHAR, Pavneet Singh; TIAN, Yuan; YANG, Xiaohu; LI, Shanping; SUN, Jianling; and ZHOU, Bo.
BOAT: An Experimental Platform for Researchers to Comparatively and Reproducibly Evaluate Bug Localization Techniques. (2014). ICSE Companion 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering: May 31-June 7, Hyderabad, India. 572-575.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2178
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/2591062.2591066
Comments
BOAT available at http://www.vlis.zju.edu.cn/blp.