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Article
Analyzing requirements and traceability information to improve bug localization
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018), Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018 May 28-29
  • Michael RATH
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Patrick MADER
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
5-2018
Abstract

Locating bugs in industry-size software systems is time consuming and challenging. An automated approach for assisting the process of tracing from bug descriptions to relevant source code benefits developers. A large body of previous work aims to address this problem and demonstrates considerable achievements. Most existing approaches focus on the key challenge of improving techniques based on textual similarity to identify relevant files. However, there exists a lexical gap between the natural language used to formulate bug reports and the formal source code and its comments. To bridge this gap, state-of-the-art approaches contain a component for analyzing bug history information to increase retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach TraceScore that also utilizes projects' requirements information and explicit dependency trace links to further close the gap in order to relate a new bug report to defective source code files. Our evaluation on more than 13,000 bug reports shows, that TraceScore significantly outperforms two state-of-the-art methods. Further, by integrating TraceScore into an existing bug localization algorithm, we found that TraceScore significantly improves retrieval performance by 49% in terms of mean average precision (MAP).

ISBN
9781450357166
Identifier
10.1145/3196398.3196415
Publisher
ACM, New York, USA
City or Country
Gothenburg, Sweden
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196415
Citation Information
Michael RATH, David LO and Patrick MADER. "Analyzing requirements and traceability information to improve bug localization" Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018), Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018 May 28-29 (2018) p. 442 - 453
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/185/