Poster: Improving Bug Localization with Report Quality Dynamics and Query Reformulation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the quality and structure of bug reports influence the effectiveness of IR-based bug localization and proposes query reformulation as a solution to improve performance.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of bug report quality dynamics and introduces query reformulation techniques to enhance bug localization accuracy.

Findings

Bug report quality significantly impacts IR-based bug localization performance.

Excessive structured information like stack traces may hinder bug localization.

Query reformulation can mitigate issues caused by poor report quality.

Abstract

Recent findings from a user study suggest that IR-based bug localization techniques do not perform well if the bug report lacks rich structured information such as relevant program entity names. On the contrary, excessive structured information such as stack traces in the bug report might always not be helpful for the automated bug localization. In this paper, we conduct a large empirical study using 5,500 bug reports from eight subject systems and replicating three existing studies from the literature. Our findings (1) empirically demonstrate how quality dynamics of bug reports affect the performances of IR-based bug localization, and (2) suggest potential ways (e.g., query reformulations) to overcome such limitations.