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Improving automated bug triaging with specialized topic model
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Xin XIA, Zhejiang University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Ying DING, Singapore Management University
  • Jafar M. AL-KOFAHI, Iowa State University
  • Tien N. NGUYEN, Iowa State University
  • Xinyu WANG, Zhejiang University
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2017
Abstract

Bug triaging refers to the process of assigning a bug to the most appropriate developer to fix. It becomes more and more difficult and complicated as the size of software and the number of developers increase. In this paper, we propose a new framework for bug triaging, which maps the words in the bug reports (i.e., the term space) to their corresponding topics (i.e., the topic space). We propose a specialized topic modeling algorithm named multi-feature topic model (MTM) which extends Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for bug triaging. MTM considers product and component information of bug reports to map the term space to the topic space. Finally, we propose an incremental learning method named TopicMiner which considers the topic distribution of a new bug report to assign an appropriate fixer based on the affinity of the fixer to the topics. We pair TopicMiner with MTM (TopicMinerMTM ). We have evaluated our solution on 5 large bug report datasets including GCC, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Netbeans, and Eclipse containing a total of 227,278 bug reports. We show that TopicMiner MTM can achieve top-1 and top-5 prediction accuracies of 0.4831-0.6868, and 0.7686-0.9084, respectively. We also compare TopicMinerMTM with Bugzie, LDA-KL, SVM-LDA, LDA-Activity, and Yang et al.'s approach. The results show that TopicMiner MTM on average improves top-1 and top-5 prediction accuracies of Bugzie by 128.48 and 53.22 percent, LDA-KL by 262.91 and 105.97 percent, SVM-LDA by 205.89 and 110.48 percent, LDA-Activity by 377.60 and 176.32 percent, and Yang et al.'s approach by 59.88 and 13.70 percent, respectively.

Keywords
  • bug triaging,
  • Developer,
  • feature information,
  • topic model
Identifier
10.1109/TSE.2016.2576454
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2016.2576454
Citation Information
Xin XIA, David LO, Ying DING, Jafar M. AL-KOFAHI, et al.. "Improving automated bug triaging with specialized topic model" IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol. 43 Iss. 3 (2017) p. 272 - 297 ISSN: 0098-5589
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/274/