Network-Clustered Multi-Modal Bug Localization

TL;DR

This paper introduces NetML, a novel bug localization method that combines textual bug report data and program spectra using network-regularized clustering and adaptive learning, significantly improving localization accuracy.

Contribution

NetML is the first approach to jointly optimize bug report and program spectrum clustering for bug localization, leveraging multi-modal data with network Lasso regularization.

Findings

NetML outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 31.82% in bug localization success rate.

NetML achieves higher MAP scores, indicating better overall bug localization precision.

Extensive experiments on seven software systems validate the effectiveness of NetML.

Abstract

Developers often spend much effort and resources to debug a program. To help the developers debug, numerous information retrieval (IR)-based and spectrum-based bug localization techniques have been devised. IR-based techniques process textual information in bug reports, while spectrum-based techniques process program spectra (i.e., a record of which program elements are executed for each test case). While both techniques ultimately generate a ranked list of program elements that likely contain a bug, they only consider one source of information--either bug reports or program spectra--which is not optimal. In light of this deficiency, this paper presents a new approach dubbed Network-clustered Multi-modal Bug Localization (NetML), which utilizes multi-modal information from both bug reports and program spectra to localize bugs. NetML facilitates an effective bug localization by carrying out a joint optimization of bug localization error and clustering of both bug reports and program elements (i.e., methods). The clustering is achieved through the incorporation of network Lasso regularization, which incentivizes the model parameters of similar bug reports and similar program elements to be close together. To estimate the model parameters of both bug reports and methods, NetML employs an adaptive learning procedure based on Newton method that updates the parameters on a per-feature basis. Extensive experiments on 355 real bugs from seven software systems have been conducted to benchmark NetML against various state-of-the-art localization methods. The results show that NetML surpasses the best-performing baseline by 31.82%, 22.35%, 19.72%, and 19.24%, in terms of the number of bugs successfully localized when a developer inspects the top 1, 5, and 10 methods and Mean Average Precision (MAP), respectively.