A Systematic Study of Duplicate Bug Report Detection

Abstract

Defects are an integral part of any software project. They can arise at any time, at any phase of the software development or the maintenance phase. In open source projects, open bug repositories are used to maintain the bug reports. When a new bug report arrives, a person called “Triager” analyzes the bug report and assign it to some responsible developer. But before assigning, has to look if it is duplicate or not. Duplicate Bug Report is one of the big problems in the maintenance of bug repositories. Lack of knowledge and vocabulary skills of reporters sometimes increases the effort required for this purpose. Bug Tracking Systems are usually used to maintain the bug reports and are the most consulted resource during the maintenance process. Because of the Uncoordinated nature of the submission of bug reports to the tracking system, many times the same bug report is reported by many users. Duplicate Bug Reports lead to the waste of resources and the economy. It creates problems for triagers and requires a lot of analysis and validation. Lot of work has been done in the field of duplicate bug report detection. In this paper, we present the researches systematically done in this field by classifying the works into three categories and listing down the methods being used for the classified researches. The paper considers the papers till January 2020 for the analysis purpose. The paper mentions the strengths, limitations, data set, and the major approach used by the popular papers of the research in this field. The paper also lists the challenges and future directions in this field of research.