Two-Level Information-Retrieval-Based Model for Bug Localization Based on Bug Reports

Abstract

Software bugs are a noteworthy concern for developers and maintainers. When a failure is detected late, it costs more to be fixed. To repair the bug that caused the software failure, the location of the bug must first be known. The process of finding the defective source code elements that led to the failure of the software is called bug localization. Effective approaches for automatically locating bugs using bug reports are highly desirable, as they would reduce bug-fixing time, consequently lowering software maintenance costs. With the increasing size and complexity of software projects, manual bug localization methods have become complex, challenging, and time-consuming tasks, which motivates research on automated bug localization techniques. This paper introduces a novel bug localization model, which works on two levels. The first level localizes the buggy classes using an information retrieval approach and it has two additional sub-phases, namely the class-level feature scoring phase and the class-level final score and ranking phase, which ranks the top buggy classes. The second level localizes the buggy methods inside these classes using an information retrieval approach and it has two sub-phases, which are the method-level feature scoring phase and the method-level final score and ranking phase, which ranks the top buggy methods inside the localized classes. A model is evaluated using an AspectJ dataset, and it can correctly localize and rank more than 350 classes and more than 136 methods. The evaluation results show that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) metrics and the mean average precision (MAP) in class-level bug localization.