Bug Triage

General Overview

Open source software projects typically have a bug repository that allows both developers and users to post problems encountered with the software, suggest possible enhancements, and comment upon existing bug reports. Popular open source projects receive lots of bug reports.

Since more bugs are reported than can be easily handled, each bug must be triaged to determine if it describes a meaningful new problem or enhancement, and if it does, it must be assigned to an appropriate developer for further handling.

We are investigating approaches to help automate two parts of the bug triage process:

• Bug Report Assignment
• Duplicate Detection

Our work as been published at a number of venues. See our publications listing below.

• Publications

John Anvik, Lyndon Hiew and Gail Murphy (OK, lousy way to put people on this - other suggestions?)

Bug Report Assignment

One step in bug triaging is assigning a developer to a newly received report. We are developing an approach for semi-automating this assignment. Our approach uses a machine-learning algorithm that is applied to the information about how bugs have been assigned in the past to recommend developers to whom a new bug should be assigned.

In the near future, we will have an assignment tool available that provides a list of recommendations for the following projects:

• Eclipse Platform
• Firefox Browser

The tool will be provided in two formats:

• A Firefox extension.
• An Eclipse plug-in.

E-mail John Anvik if you wish to be informed when the tool becomes available of if you would like to find out if you can use the tool on another project. Note, your project must meet the following conditions to be applicable for our tool:

1. Uses Bugzilla (V.2.16 or higher) for tracking bug reports where the default layout for bug reports has not been altered.
2. The project contains more than 20 developers who actively fix bugs.
3. The project had 1000+ reports marked as FIXED in the last 8 months.

Duplicate Detection

Identifying which new bug reports are duplicates of previous reports is one task a bug triager performs. This can be a daunting task in large projects where there are thousands of reports to search through. We use the approach of event detection systems from Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) research that identify whether a news story describes a new, previously unseen event or a old news event. A tool has been implemented which indicates if a new report is unique or a duplicate. If the report is believed to be a duplicate, the tool suggests which previous reports might be duplicates.

A study is being conducted to determine how beneficial the duplicate detection tool would be to bug triagers, given the accuracy of the current approach. We are looking at what effects the tool would have on a triager's duplicate detection accuracy and their workload.

Future plans include implementing the tool as a Firefox extension.

If you are interested in participating in the study or would like to be notified when the tool becomes available, email Lyndon Hiew.

Publications

• Who Should Fix This Bug?, ICSE 2006.
• Coping with Bug Repositories, eTx Workshop at OOPSLA 2005.