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A contextual approach towards more accurate duplicate bug report detection and ranking

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Abstract

The issue-tracking systems used by software projects contain issues, bugs, or tickets written by a wide variety of bug reporters, with different levels of training and knowledge about the system under development. Typically, reporters lack the skills and/or time to search the issue-tracking system for similar issues already reported. As a result, many reports end up referring to the same issue, which effectively makes the bug-report triaging process time consuming and error prone. Many researchers have approached the bug-deduplication problem using off-the-shelf information-retrieval (IR) tools. In this work, we extend the state of the art by investigating how contextual information about software-quality attributes, software-architecture terms, and system-development topics can be exploited to improve bug deduplication. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contextual bug-deduplication method at ranking duplicates on the bug repositories of the Android, Eclipse, Mozilla, and OpenOffice software systems. Based on this experience, we conclude that taking into account domain-specific context can improve IR methods for bug deduplication.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sun et al. (2011) for sharing their Eclipse, OpenOffice, and Mozilla datasets with us. Abram Hindle and Eleni Stroulia were supported by NSERC Discovery Grants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Abram Hindle, Anahita Alipour & Eleni Stroulia

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  1. Abram Hindle
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  2. Anahita Alipour
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  3. Eleni Stroulia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Abram Hindle.

Additional information

Communicated by: Massimiliano Di Penta and Sung Kim

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Hindle, A., Alipour, A. & Stroulia, E. A contextual approach towards more accurate duplicate bug report detection and ranking. Empir Software Eng 21, 368–410 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-015-9387-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-015-9387-3

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