Guiding Bug Triage through Developer Analysis in Bug Reports

Tao Zhang, Geunseok Yang, Byungjeong Lee, Alvin T.S. Chan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

An important part of software maintenance is bug report analysis during bug-fixing, especially for large-scale software projects. Since bugs reported to the bug repository need to be fixed, triagers are responsible to identify appropriate developers to execute the fix. Previous research focused on optimizing this process, such as by duplicate detection and use of developer recommendations for reducing the workload of triagers. However, there were scant studies that analyzed developer roles (e.g. reporter and assignee) in the bug-fixing process. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study of the different roles that developers perform in bug resolution. By extracting the factors that affect bug resolution from the analysis results, we propose a novel bug triage algorithm to recommend the appropriate developers to fix a given bug. We implement the proposed recommendations on the Eclipse and Mozilla Firefox projects, with the results showing that the new bug triage algorithm can effectively recommend which experts should fix given bugs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)405-431
Number of pages27
JournalInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
Volume26
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2016

Keywords

  • Bug-fixing
  • bug report analysis
  • developer recommendation
  • software maintenance

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