Bug Triage Model Considering Cooperative and Sequential Relationship

Faced with a large number of bugs in the process of software development and maintenance, the existing bug triage method assigns appropriate fixers to the bug by analyzing the text content of the bug report or relationship network. However, the bug repair is a cooperative process with sequential relationship. The tracking system records bugs successively according to the time, which indicates the dynamic changes of the tracking system. In addition to fixers, reviewers, products and components also play an important role in bug triage. Previous studies have often overlooked the sequential and cooperative relationship in the repair process, and the result of bug triage is not ideal. In this paper, we propose a bug triage model considering cooperative and sequential relationship (BTCSR). Firstly, the similar historical reports are determined by analyzing the text content of the bug report. Secondly, considering the cooperative relationship in the bug tracking system, we construct a heterogeneous bug collaborative network that includes bug reports, fixers, products, components, and reviewers. The time decay function is set up in the network to preserve the sequential connection of nodes. We map different types of nodes to the same space, and generate node representations that retain the cooperative and sequential relationship. Finally, the similarity degree between fixers and bugs are quantified by node representations, and the recommended fixer list is obtained. We conduct extensive comparative experiments on four open source software projects, and the results show that BTCSR has obvious advantages in recall rates, so BTCSR is effective.