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Automated prediction of bug report priority using multi-factor analysis

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Abstract

Bugs are prevalent. To improve software quality, developers often allow users to report bugs that they found using a bug tracking system such as Bugzilla. Users would specify among other things, a description of the bug, the component that is affected by the bug, and the severity of the bug. Based on this information, bug triagers would then assign a priority level to the reported bug. As resources are limited, bug reports would be investigated based on their priority levels. This priority assignment process however is a manual one. Could we do better? In this paper, we propose an automated approach based on machine learning that would recommend a priority level based on information available in bug reports. Our approach considers multiple factors, temporal, textual, author, related-report, severity, and product, that potentially affect the priority level of a bug report. These factors are extracted as features which are then used to train a discriminative model via a new classification algorithm that handles ordinal class labels and imbalanced data. Experiments on more than a hundred thousands bug reports from Eclipse show that we can outperform baseline approaches in terms of average F-measure by a relative improvement of up to 209 %.

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Notes

  1. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Serge Demeyer and Foutse Khomh for their comments and advice during our ICSM’13 paper presentation and in the subsequent email exchanges. Their comments and advice motivate us to consider the three additional scenarios: “Assigned”, “First”, and “No-P3”. We would also like to acknowledge Kun Mei, Shaowei Wang, Yang Feng, Lingfeng Bao, and Wenchao Xu for their help in the collection of status histories of bug reports that we analyze in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yuan Tian & David Lo

  2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Xin Xia

  3. University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Chengnian Sun

Authors
  1. Yuan Tian
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  2. David Lo
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  3. Xin Xia
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  4. Chengnian Sun
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuan Tian.

Additional information

Communicated by: Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc and Tom Mens

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Tian, Y., Lo, D., Xia, X. et al. Automated prediction of bug report priority using multi-factor analysis. Empir Software Eng 20, 1354–1383 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9331-y

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