Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2015

Abstract

Bugs are prevalent. To improve software quality, developers often allow users to report bugs that they found using a bug tracking system such as Bugzilla. Users would specify among other things, a description of the bug, the component that is affected by the bug, and the severity of the bug. Based on this information, bug triagers would then assign a priority level to the reported bug. As resources are limited, bug reports would be investigated based on their priority levels. This priority assignment process however is a manual one. Could we do better? In this paper, we propose an automated approach based on machine learning that would recommend a priority level based on information available in bug reports. Our approach considers multiple factors, temporal, textual, author, related-report, severity, and product, that potentially affect the priority level of a bug report. These factors are extracted as features which are then used to train a discriminative model via a new classification algorithm that handles ordinal class labels and imbalanced data. Experiments on more than a hundred thousands bug reports from Eclipse show that we can outperform baseline approaches in terms of average F-measure by a relative improvement of up to 209 %.

Keywords

Bug report management, Priority prediction, Multi-factor analysis

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Empirical Software Engineering

Volume

20

Issue

5

First Page

1354

Last Page

1383

ISSN

1382-3256

Identifier

10.1007/s10664-014-9331-y

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9331-y

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