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Article
Automated Prediction of Bug Report Priority Using Multi-Factor Analysis
Empirical Software Engineering
  • Yuan TIAN, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Chengnian SUN, University of California at Davis
  • Xin XIA, Zhejiang University
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
Identifier
10.1007/s10664-014-9331-y
Publisher
Springer Verlag
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9331-y
Citation Information
Yuan TIAN, David LO, Chengnian SUN and Xin XIA. "Automated Prediction of Bug Report Priority Using Multi-Factor Analysis" Empirical Software Engineering Vol. 20 Iss. 5 (2015) p. 1354 - 1383 ISSN: 1382-3256
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/192/