A Technique to Recommend Appropriate Developers for Reported Bugs Based on Term Similarity and Bug Resolution History

Abstract

During the development of the software, a variety of bugs are reported. Several bug tracking systems, such as, Bugzilla, MantisBT, Trac, JIRA, are used to deal with reported bug information in many open source development projects. Bug reports in bug tracking system would be triaged to manage bugs and determine developer who is responsible for resolving the bug report. As the size of the software is increasingly growing and bug reports tend to be duplicated, bug triage becomes more and more complex and difficult. In this paper, we present an approach to assign bug reports to appropriate developers, which is a main part of bug triage task. At first, words which have been included the resolved bug reports are classified according to each developer. Second, words in newly bug reports are selected. After first and second steps, vectors whose items are the selected words are generated. At the third step, TF-IDF(Term frequency -Inverse document frequency) of the each selected words are computed, which is the weight value of each vector item. Finally, the developers are recommended based on the similarity between the developer's word vector and the vector of new bug report. We conducted an experiment on Eclipse JDT and CDT project to show the applicability of the proposed approach. We also compared the proposed approach with an existing study which is based on machine learning. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is superior to existing method.