Assisting bug report triage through recommendation

A key collaborative hub for many software development projects is the issue tracking system, or bug repository. The use of a bug repository can improve the software development process in a number of ways including allowing developers who are geographically distributed to communicate about project development. However, reports added to the repository need to be triaged by a human, called the triager, to determine if reports are meaningful. If a report is meaningful, the triager decides how to organize the report for integration into the project's development process. We call triager decisions with the goal of determining if a report is meaningful, repository-oriented decisions, and triager decisions that organize reports for the development process, development-oriented decisions. Triagers can become overwhelmed by the number of reports added to the repository. Time spent triaging also typically diverts valuable resources away from the improvement of the product to the managing of the development process. To assist triagers, this dissertation presents a machine learning approach to create recommenders that assist with a variety of development-oriented decisions. In this way, we strive to reduce human involvement in triage by moving the triager's role from having to gather information to make a decision to that of confirming a suggestion. This dissertation introduces a triage-assisting recommender creation process that can create a variety of different development-oriented decision recommenders for a range of projects. The recommenders created with this approach are accurate: recommenders for which developer to assign a report have a precision of 70% to 98% over five open source projects, recommenders for which product component the report is for have a recall of 72% to 92%, and recommenders for who to add to the cc: list of a report that have a recall of 46% to 72%. We have evaluated recommenders created with our triage-assisting recommender creation process using both an analytic evaluation and a field study. In addition, we present in this dissertation an approach to assist project members to specify the project-specific values for the triage-assisting recommender creation process, and show that such recommenders can be created with a subset of the repository data.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

University of British Columbia

Year dc:date

2007

Author dc:creator

• Anvik, John

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/265

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/265