iTiger: An automatic issue title generation tool

• Main Authors: ZHANG, Ting, IRSAN, Ivana Clairine, Ferdian, Thung, HAN, DongGyun, LO, David, JIANG, Lingxiao
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: software engineering; bug; automatic issue title; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7640; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8643/viewcontent/FSE22iTigerDemo.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In both commercial and open-source software, bug reports or issues are used to track bugs or feature requests. However, the quality of issues can differ a lot. Prior research has found that bug reports with good quality tend to gain more attention than the ones with poor quality. As an essential component of an issue, title quality is an important aspect of issue quality. Moreover, issues are usually presented in a list view, where only the issue title and some metadata are present. In this case, a concise and accurate title is crucial for readers to grasp the general concept of the issue and facilitate the issue triaging. Previous work formulated the issue title generation task as a one-sentence summarization task. A sequence-to-sequence model was employed to solve this task. However, it requires a large amount of domain-specific training data to attain good performance in issue title generation. Recently, pre-trained models, which learned knowledge from large-scale general corpora, have shown much success in software engineering tasks.In this work, we make the first attempt to fine-tune BART, which has been pre-trained using English corpora, to generate issue titles. We implemented the fine-tuned BART as a web tool named iTiger, which can suggest an issue title based on the issue description. iTiger is fine-tuned on 267,094 GitHub issues. We compared iTiger with the state-of-the-art method, i.e., iTAPE, on 33,438 issues. The automatic evaluation shows that iTiger outperforms iTAPE by 29.7Demo URL: https://youtu.be/-JMWR9-lR78Source code and replication package URL: https://github.com/soarsmu/iTiger