Detect Related Bugs from Source Code Using Bug Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces Rebug-Detector, a tool that uses bug reports and code features to identify related bugs in source code, demonstrated on Apache Lucene-Java with promising results.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach combining bug report analysis and code feature similarity to detect related bugs in large software projects.

Findings

Detected 61 related bugs in Apache Lucene-Java

Successfully identified 21 real bugs and 10 suspected bugs

Detection process takes approximately 15.5 minutes

Abstract

Open source projects often maintain open bug repositories during development and maintenance, and the reporters often point out straightly or implicitly the reasons why bugs occur when they submit them. The comments about a bug are very valuable for developers to locate and fix the bug. Meanwhile, it is very common in large software for programmers to override or overload some methods according to the same logic. If one method causes a bug, it is obvious that other overridden or overloaded methods maybe cause related or similar bugs. In this paper, we propose and implement a tool Rebug- Detector, which detects related bugs using bug information and code features. Firstly, it extracts bug features from bug information in bug repositories; secondly, it locates bug methods from source code, and then extracts code features of bug methods; thirdly, it calculates similarities between each overridden or overloaded method and bug methods; lastly, it determines which method maybe causes potential related or similar bugs. We evaluate Rebug-Detector on an open source project: Apache Lucene-Java. Our tool totally detects 61 related bugs, including 21 real bugs and 10 suspected bugs, and it costs us about 15.5 minutes. The results show that bug features and code features extracted by our tool are useful to find real bugs in existing projects.