Adaptive Ranking Relevant Source Files for Bug Reports Using Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Precisely locating buggy files for a given bug report is a cumbersome and time-consuming task, particularly in a large-scale project with thousands of source files and bug reports. An efficient bug localization module is desirable to improve the productivity of the software maintenance phase. Many previous approaches rank source files according to their relevance to a given bug report based on simple lexical matching scores. However, the lexical mismatches between natural language expressions used to describe bug reports and technical terms of software source code might reduce the bug localization system’s accuracy. Incorporating domain knowledge through some features such as the semantic similarity, the fixing frequency of a source file, the code change history and similar bug reports is crucial to efficiently locating buggy files. In this paper, we propose a bug localization model, BugLocGA that leverages both lexical and semantic information as well as explores the relation between a bug report and a source file through some domain features. Given a bug report, we calculate the ranking score with every source files through a weighted sum of all features, where the weights are trained through a genetic algorithm with the aim of maximizing the performance of the bug localization model using two evaluation metrics: mean reciprocal rank (MRR) and mean average precision (MAP). The empirical results conducted on some widely-used open source software projects have showed that our model outperformed some state of the art approaches by effectively recommending relevant files where the bug should be fixed.