A time-based approach to automatic bug report assignment

Abstract

Bug assignment is one of the important activities in bug triaging that aims to assign bugs to the appropriate developers for fixing. Many recommended automatic bug assignment approaches are based on text analysis methods such as machine learning and information retrieval methods. Most of these approaches use term-weighting techniques, such as term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), to determine the value of terms. However, the existing term-weighting techniques only deal with frequency of terms without considering the metadata associated with the terms that exist in software repositories. This paper aims to improve automatic bug assignment by using time-metadata in tf-idf (Time-tf-idf). In the Time-tf-idf technique, the recency of using the term by the developer is considered in determining the values of the developer expertise. An evaluation of the recommended automatic bug assignment approach that uses Time-tf-idf, called ABA-Time-tf-idf, was conducted on three open-source projects. The evaluation shows accuracy and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) improvements of up to 11.8% and 8.94%, respectively, in comparison to the use of tf-idf. Moreover, the ABA-Time-tf-idf approach outperforms the accuracy and MRR of commonly used approaches in automatic bug assignment by up to 45.52% and 55.54%, respectively. Consequently, consideration of time-metadata in term weighting reasonably leads to improvements in automatic bug assignment.