Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2014
Abstract
Bug localization refers to the task of automatically processing bug reports to locate source code files that are responsible for the bugs. Many bug localization techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques are often evaluated on issue reports that are marked as bugs by their reporters in issue tracking systems. However, recent findings by Herzig et al. find that a substantial number of issue reports marked as bugs, are not bugs but other kinds of issues like refactorings, request for enhancement, documentation changes, test case creation, and so on. Herzig et al. report that these misclassifications affect bug prediction, namely the task of predicting which files are likely to be buggy in the future. In this work, we investigate whether these misclassifications also affect bug localization. To do so, we analyze issue reports that have been manually categorized by Herzig et al. and apply a bug localization technique to recover a ranked list of candidate buggy files for each issue report. We then evaluate whether the quality of ranked lists of reports reported as bugs is the same as that of real bug reports. Our findings shed light that there is a need for additional cleaning steps to be performed on issue reports before they are used to evaluate bug localization techniques.
Discipline
Computer Sciences | Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories: May 31-June 1, 2014, Hyderabad
First Page
296
Last Page
299
ISBN
9781450328630
Identifier
10.1145/2597073.2597105
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
KOCCHAR, Pavneet Singh; LE, Tien-Duy B.; and LO, David.
It's not a bug, it's a feature: Does misclassification affect bug localization?. (2014). MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories: May 31-June 1, 2014, Hyderabad. 296-299.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2606
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/10.1145/2597073.2597105