Severity Assessment of a Reported Bug by Considering its Uncertainty and Irregular State

Abstract

An accurate bug severity assessment is an important factor in bug fixing. Bugs are reported on the bug tracking system by different users with a fast speed. The size of software repositories is also increasing at an enormous rate. This increased size often has much uncertainty and irregularities. The factors that cause uncertainty are biases, noise and abnormality in data. The authors consider that software bug report phenomena on the bug tracking system keeps an irregular state. Without proper handling of these uncertainties and irregularities, the performance of learning strategies can be significantly reduced. To incorporate and consider these two phenomena, they have used entropy as an attribute to assess bug severity. The authors have predicted the bug severity by using machine learning techniques, namely KNN, J48, RF, RNG, NB, CNN and MLR. They have validated the classifiers using PITS, Eclipse and Mozilla projects. The results show that the proposed entropy-based approaches improves the performance as compared to the state of the art approach considered in this article.