DABT: A Dependency-aware Bug Triaging Method

TL;DR

DABT is a novel bug triaging method that uses NLP and integer programming to assign bugs efficiently by considering textual info, costs, and dependencies, reducing overdue bugs and fixing time.

Contribution

This paper introduces DABT, a comprehensive bug triaging approach that incorporates bug text, costs, and dependencies, improving assignment accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

Reduces overdue bugs by up to 12%.

Halves the average bug fixing time.

Simplifies bug dependency graphs.

Abstract

In software engineering practice, fixing a bug promptly reduces the associated costs. On the other hand, the manual bug fixing process can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. In this work, we introduce a bug triaging method, called Dependency-aware Bug Triaging (DABT), which leverages natural language processing and integer programming to assign bugs to appropriate developers. Unlike previous works that mainly focus on one aspect of the bug reports, DABT considers the textual information, cost associated with each bug, and dependency among them. Therefore, this comprehensive formulation covers the most important aspect of the previous works while considering the blocking effect of the bugs. We report the performance of the algorithm on three open-source software systems, i.e., EclipseJDT, LibreOffice, and Mozilla. Our result shows that DABT is able to reduce the number of overdue bugs up to 12\%. It also decreases the average fixing time of the bugs by half. Moreover, it reduces the complexity of the bug dependency graph by prioritizing blocking bugs.