BushraDBR: An Automatic Approach to Retrieving Duplicate Bug Reports

TL;DR

BushraDBR is an automatic method that uses textual similarity and information retrieval techniques to efficiently identify duplicate bug reports in bug tracking systems, saving time and effort in software maintenance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining LSI and FCA to proactively retrieve duplicate bug reports before they are officially submitted.

Findings

Effective retrieval of duplicate bug reports demonstrated on public datasets.

BushraDBR reduces redundant work by early detection of duplicates.

Approach outperforms existing methods in efficiency and accuracy.

Abstract

A Bug Tracking System (BTS), such as Bugzilla, is generally utilized to track submitted Bug Reports (BRs) for a particular software system. Duplicate Bug Report (DBR) retrieval is the process of obtaining a DBR in the BTS. This process is important to avoid needless work from engineers on DBRs. To prevent wasting engineer resources, such as effort and time, on previously submitted (or duplicate) BRs, it is essential to find and retrieve DBRs as soon as they are submitted by software users. Thus, this paper proposes an automatic approach (called BushraDBR) that aims to assist an engineer (called a triager) to retrieve DBRs and stop the duplicates before they start. Where BushraDBR stands for Bushra Duplicate Bug Reports retrieval process. Therefore, when a new BR is sent to the Bug Repository (BRE), an engineer checks whether it is a duplicate of an existing BR in BRE or not via BushraDBR approach. If it is, the engineer marks it as DBR, and the BR is excluded from consideration for any additional work; otherwise, the BR is added to the BRE. BushraDBR approach relies on Textual Similarity (TS) between the newly submitted BR and the rest of the BRs in BRE to retrieve DBRs. BushraDBR exploits unstructured data from BRs to apply Information Retrieval (IR) methods in an efficient way. BushraDBR approach uses two techniques to retrieve DBRs: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The originality of BushraDBR is to stop DBRs before they occur by comparing the newly reported BR with the rest of the BRs in the BTS, thus saving time and effort during the Software Maintenance (SM) process. BushraDBR also uniquely retrieves DBR through the use of LSI and FCA techniques. BushraDBR approach had been validated and evaluated on several publicly available data sets from Bugzilla. Experiments show the ability of BushraDBR approach to retrieve DBRs in an efficient manner.