{"title":"Locating Faulty Source Code Files to Fix Bug Reports","authors":"A. Hamdy, Abdelrahman E. Arabi","doi":"10.4018/ijossp.308791","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Open source software is usually released while it still contains bugs. In order to fix a reported bug during maintenance phase, the developer has to search the source code files to identify the faulty ones; this process is called bug localization (BL). Automating BL is a necessity to boost the developer's productivity and enhance the software quality. The paper proposes an information retrieval based approach for retrieving and ranking a list of suspicious faulty source files relevant to a submitted bug report (BR). The proposed approach leverages textual features of the BRs and source files, which are parts-of-speech tagging, lexical and semantic similarity between the source files and BRs, in addition to the source file change history. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was evaluated over three open-source software repositories. Experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed approach over eight previous approaches in terms of top@N and MAP metrics.","PeriodicalId":53605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes","volume":"87 10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.4018/ijossp.308791","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"Computer Science","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Open source software is usually released while it still contains bugs. In order to fix a reported bug during maintenance phase, the developer has to search the source code files to identify the faulty ones; this process is called bug localization (BL). Automating BL is a necessity to boost the developer's productivity and enhance the software quality. The paper proposes an information retrieval based approach for retrieving and ranking a list of suspicious faulty source files relevant to a submitted bug report (BR). The proposed approach leverages textual features of the BRs and source files, which are parts-of-speech tagging, lexical and semantic similarity between the source files and BRs, in addition to the source file change history. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was evaluated over three open-source software repositories. Experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed approach over eight previous approaches in terms of top@N and MAP metrics.
期刊介绍:
The International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP) publishes high-quality peer-reviewed and original research articles on the large field of open source software and processes. This wide area entails many intriguing question and facets, including the special development process performed by a large number of geographically dispersed programmers, community issues like coordination and communication, motivations of the participants, and also economic and legal issues. Beyond this topic, open source software is an example of a highly distributed innovation process led by the users. Therefore, many aspects have relevance beyond the realm of software and its development. In this tradition, IJOSSP also publishes papers on these topics. IJOSSP is a multi-disciplinary outlet, and welcomes submissions from all relevant fields of research and applying a multitude of research approaches.