CrossFix: Collaborative bug fixing by recommending similar bugs

TL;DR

CrossFix is a tool that leverages similar bug reports across projects to assist developers in debugging and fixing by suggesting relevant issues based on shared characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel collaborative bug fixing approach that recommends similar bugs from different projects, overcoming limitations of existing repair techniques.

Findings

CrossFix successfully suggests relevant similar bugs for 249 open issues.

The approach helps developers understand bugs better and accelerates fixing process.

Similar bugs share key attributes like libraries, functionalities, and errors.

Abstract

Many automated program repair techniques have been proposed for fixing bugs. Some of these techniques use the information beyond the given buggy program and test suite to improve the quality of generated patches. However, there are several limitations that hinder the wide adoption of these techniques, including (1) they rely on a fixed set of repair templates for patch generation or reference implementation, (2) searching for the suitable reference implementation is challenging, (3) generated patches are not explainable. Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across different projects and one could use the GitHub issue from a different project for finding new bugs for a related project. We propose collaborative bug fixing, a novelapproach that suggests bug reports that describe a similar bug. Our studyredefines similar bugs as bugs that share the (1) same libraries, (2) same functionalities, (3) same reproduction steps, (4) same configurations, (5) sameoutcomes, or (6) same errors. Moreover, our study revealed the usefulness of similar bugs in helping developers in finding more context about the bug and fixing. Based on our study, we design CrossFix, a tool that automatically suggests relevant GitHub issues based on an open GitHub issue. Our evaluation on 249 open issues from Java and Android projects shows that CrossFix could suggest similar bugs to help developers in debugging and fixing.