Bug reports retrieval using Self-organizing Map

An important process when implementing complex software systems consist of documenting the bugs found in that software. However, since many developers are working at the same time on the project, a bug may easily be reported multiple times, resulting in duplicated bug reports. Therefore, developers responsible for fixing bugs may spend time and effort reading and trying to understand two bugs that actually are the same. This way, we propose in this paper an approach for identifying duplicated bug reports that combines document indexing and self-organizing maps (SOM). The results of our experiments show that at most 69% of duplicated bug reports were identified, representing saving of time and effort for the developers.