Leveraging textual properties of bug reports to localize relevant source files

Abstract Bug reports are an essential part of a software project's life cycle since resolving them improves the project's quality. When a new bug report is received, developers usually need to reproduce the bug and perform code review to locate the bug and assign it to be fixed. However, the huge number of bug reports and the increasing size of software projects make this process tedious and time-consuming. To solve this issue, bug localization techniques try to rank all the source files of a project with respect to how likely they are to contain a bug. This process reduces the search space of source files and helps developers to find relevant source files quicker. In this paper, we propose a multi-component bug localization approach that leverages different textual properties of bug reports and source files as well as the relations between previously fixed bug reports and a newly received one. Our approach uses information retrieval, textual matching, stack trace analysis, and multi-label classification to improve the performance of bug localization. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on three open source software projects (i.e., AspectJ, SWT, and ZXing) and the results show that it can rank appropriate source files for more than 52% of bugs by recommending only one source file and 78% by recommending ten files. It also improves the MRR and MAP values compared to several existing state-of-the-art bug localization approaches.

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