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Why and what happened? Aiding bug comprehension with automated category and causal link identification

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Abstract

When a new bug report is assigned to developers, they first need to understand what the bug report expresses (what) and why this bug occurs (why). To do so, developers usually explore different bug related data sources to investigate whether there are historical bugs with similar symptoms and causes related to the bug at hand. Automatic bug classification with respect to what and why information of bugs would enable developers to narrow down their search of bug resources and improve the bug fixing productivity. To achieve this goal, we propose an approach, BugClass, which applies a deep neural network classification approach based on Hierarchical Attention Networks (HAN) to automatically classify the bugs into different what and why categories by exploiting the bug repository and commit repository. Then, we explore the causal link relationship between what and why categories to further improve the accuracy of the bug classification. Experimental results demonstrate that BugClass is effective to classify the given bug reports into what and why categories, and can be also effectively used for identifying the why category for new bugs based on the causal link relations.

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Notes

  1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

  2. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/

  3. https://www.bugzilla.org/

  4. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

  5. The definitions and taxonomy of ODC v5.2 attributes are accessible at http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-pasanth/ODC-5-2.pdf.

  6. https://standards.ieee.org/standard/1044-1993.html

  7. http://www.nltk.org/

  8. http://code.google.com/p/word2vec/

  9. https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree

  10. http://svmlight.joachims.org/svmmulticlass.html

  11. https://github.com/LogPAI/bugrepo

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61872312, No.61972335, No.62002309); the Yangzhou city-Yangzhou University Science and Technology Cooperation Fund Project (No.YZU201803, No. YZU201902); the Six Talent Peaks Project in Jiangsu Province (No. RJFW-053), the Jiangsu “333” Project; the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China (No. 20KJB520016); the Open Funds of State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology of Nanjing University (No.KFKT2020B15, No.KFKT2020B16) and Yangzhou University Top-level Talents Support Program (2019) .

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  1. School of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China

    Cheng Zhou, Bin Li, Xiaobing Sun & Lili Bo

  2. Taizhou University, Taizhou, China

    Cheng Zhou

  3. Nanjing University, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

    Xiaobing Sun & Lili Bo

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  1. Cheng Zhou
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Correspondence to Xiaobing Sun.

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Communicated by: Shaowei Wang, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Ivano Malavolta, Christoph Treude, and Alexander Serebrenik

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Zhou, C., Li, B., Sun, X. et al. Why and what happened? Aiding bug comprehension with automated category and causal link identification. Empir Software Eng 26, 118 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10010-8

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