Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and...

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Main Authors: Kochhar, Pavneet Singh, Tian, Yuan, LO, David
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2425
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3425/viewcontent/p803_kochhar.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-34252015-11-14T15:43:12Z Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter? Kochhar, Pavneet Singh Tian, Yuan LO, David Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and fix them. To mitigate this problem, past studies have proposed information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization techniques, which takes as input a textual description of a bug stored in an issue tracking system, and returns a list of potentially buggy source code files. These studies often evaluate their effectiveness on issue reports marked as bugs in issue tracking systems, using as ground truth the set of files that are modified in commits that fix each bug. However, there are a number of potential biases that can impact the validity of the results reported in these studies. First, issue reports marked as bugs might not be reports of bugs due to error in the reporting and classification process. Many issue reports are about documentation update, request for improvement, refactoring, code cleanups, etc. Second, bug reports might already explicitly specify the buggy program files and for these reports bug localization techniques are not needed. Third, files that get modified in commits that fix the bugs might not contain the bug. This study investigates the extent these potential biases affect the results of a bug localization technique and whether bug localization researchers need to consider these potential biases when evaluating their solutions. In this paper, we analyse issue reports from three different projects: HTTPClient, Jackrabbit, and Lucene-Java to examine the impact of above three biases on bug localization. Our results show that one of these biases significantly and substantially impacts bug localization results, while the other two biases have negligible or minor impact. 2014-09-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2425 info:doi/10.1145/2642937.2642997 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3425/viewcontent/p803_kochhar.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Issue Reports Bug Localization Bias Empirical Study Information Security Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Issue Reports
Bug Localization
Bias
Empirical Study
Information Security
Software Engineering
spellingShingle Issue Reports
Bug Localization
Bias
Empirical Study
Information Security
Software Engineering
Kochhar, Pavneet Singh
Tian, Yuan
LO, David
Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
description Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and fix them. To mitigate this problem, past studies have proposed information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization techniques, which takes as input a textual description of a bug stored in an issue tracking system, and returns a list of potentially buggy source code files. These studies often evaluate their effectiveness on issue reports marked as bugs in issue tracking systems, using as ground truth the set of files that are modified in commits that fix each bug. However, there are a number of potential biases that can impact the validity of the results reported in these studies. First, issue reports marked as bugs might not be reports of bugs due to error in the reporting and classification process. Many issue reports are about documentation update, request for improvement, refactoring, code cleanups, etc. Second, bug reports might already explicitly specify the buggy program files and for these reports bug localization techniques are not needed. Third, files that get modified in commits that fix the bugs might not contain the bug. This study investigates the extent these potential biases affect the results of a bug localization technique and whether bug localization researchers need to consider these potential biases when evaluating their solutions. In this paper, we analyse issue reports from three different projects: HTTPClient, Jackrabbit, and Lucene-Java to examine the impact of above three biases on bug localization. Our results show that one of these biases significantly and substantially impacts bug localization results, while the other two biases have negligible or minor impact.
format text
author Kochhar, Pavneet Singh
Tian, Yuan
LO, David
author_facet Kochhar, Pavneet Singh
Tian, Yuan
LO, David
author_sort Kochhar, Pavneet Singh
title Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
title_short Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
title_full Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
title_fullStr Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
title_full_unstemmed Potential Biases in Bug Localization: Do they Matter?
title_sort potential biases in bug localization: do they matter?
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2014
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2425
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3425/viewcontent/p803_kochhar.pdf
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