Monday, September 22, 2008

Automatic Bug Triage Using Execution Trace and Ownership Vector Space

Came up with this idea by smashing together two papers from Greg's reading list. Using this for my NSERC & OGS applications, so please don't steal it :)


Previously presented topics on automatic bug triage (directing bug reports to the appropriate member of the development team) showed very bright prospects, but lacked enough accuracy to make them a usable product [1]. This entry point for bug information is also an excellent location to apply any number of other filtering heuristics desired, such as the duplicate detection algorithm proposed by [2]. The method proposed in [2] requires, in addition to a natural language description of the problem, and execution trace that can be used to more quantitatively measure two, or more, bug's similarities. I propose that the same execution trace could be used to assist in the triage functionality described by [1]. Since the vector space created by Wang et. al. to measure bug similarity is based on function calls, a similar approach could be used, requiring the same input execution trace, to determine bug ownership. A master vector space could be created at build time from all possible called functions in a source code repository, and assigning ownership of these functions to developers based on either activity in a source revision system, or some static assignment. This would create volumes of ownership within the function vector space. In theory, a bug report, assuming it is not a duplicate, should be assigned to the developer in whose volume the bug's vector terminates. This may also have interesting and relevant applications to visualizing ownership of code, for management purposes.

[1] D. Cubranic and G. C. Murphy, "Automatic bug triage using text categorization," in Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, F. Maurer and G. Ruhe, Eds., June 2004, pp. 92-97. [Online]. Available: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/spl/papers/2004/seke04-bugzilla.pdf

[2] X. Wang, L. Zhang, T. Xie, J. Anvik, and J. Sun, “An approach to detecting duplicate bug reports using natural language and execution information,” in Proceedings of the Thirtyth International conference on Software engineering

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*Very* nice --- keep 'em coming.