Feedback2Code: A Deep Learning Approach to Identifying User-Feedback-Related Source Code Files

Abstract

Users frequently raise feedback when using software products. Feedback from users regarding their experiences and expectations and software defects they found adds values to software maintenance and evolution — software managers collect user feedback and then dispatch feedback issues that developers (and/or maintainers) need to track and process. Feedback tracking is often supported by open source platforms and collaborative software systems. Meanwhile, there still exists a gap between feedback issues and source code: since user feedback is usually informal and arbitrary, engineers have to spend much effort on comprehending issues and identifying which source code files need to be improved or fixed. This paper introduces a deep learning approach, Feedback2Code , which facilitates identification of user-feedback-related source code files. The core idea is to (1) explore latent semantics of user feedback and source code using several deep learning techniques such as Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neutral Network (CNN) and skip-gram and (2) establish a multi-correlation model to explore linkages between feedback issues and source code files. Given a feedback issue, the linkages then allow engineers to identify source code files that are highly relevant to the issue. We have implemented Feedback2Code and evaluated it against ChangeAdvisor (a state-of-the-art approach) on 24 open source projects. The evaluation results clearly show the strength of Feedback2Code : for 103793 feedback issues, Feedback2Code successfully established 101190 feedback-code linkages and achieved a precision that is [Formula: see text] higher than that of ChangeAdvisor . Feedback2Code also achieved an MRR and an MAP that are [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] higher than those of ChangeAdvisor , respectively. Furthermore, we also found that a Feedback2Code -trained model can be easily transferred, allowing feedback-code linkages to be established in new projects with a little history data.