Who should fix that Bug?
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Dominique Matter’s paper got accepted at MSR 09, congratulations!
For his Master’s thesis, Dominique developed an approach to automatically find developers who have the appropriate expertise for solving a bug. The novel contribution of his work is that no prior bug reports are required to train the recommendation system. His approach models the expertise of developers using their source code vocabulary. He collects the word frequencies found in SVN or CVS diffs to model the expertise of a contributor.
Weighted list (aka tag cloud) created with Wordle:
Title: Assigning Bug Reports using a Vocabulary-Based Expertise Model of Developers
Abstract: For popular software systems, the number of daily submitted bug reports is high. Triaging these incoming reports is a time consuming task. Part of the bug triage is the assignment of a report to a developer with the appropriate expertise. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically suggest developers who have the appropriate expertise for handling a bug report. We model developer expertise using the vocabulary found in their source code contributions and compare this vocabulary to the vocabulary of bug reports. We evaluate our approach by comparing the suggested experts to the persons who eventually worked on the bug. Using eight years of Eclipse development as a case study, we achieve 33.6% top-1 precision and 71.0% top-10 recall.