DR_BEV: Developer Recommendation Based on Executed Vocabulary

Bug-fixing, or fixing known errors in computer software, makes up a large portion of software development expenses. Once a bug is discovered, it must be assigned to an appropriate developer who has the necessary expertise to fix the bug. This bug-assignment task has traditionally been done manually. However, this manual task is time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious. Therefore, automatic bug assignment techniques have been developed to facilitate this task. Most of the existing techniques are report-based. That is, they work on bugs that are textually described in bug reports. However, only a subset of bugs that are observed as a faulty program execution are also described textually. Certain bugs, such as security vulnerability bugs, are only represented with a faulty program execution, and are not described textually. In other words, these bugs are represented by a code coverage, which indicates which lines of source code have been executed in the faulty program execution. Promptly fixing these software security vulnerability bugs is necessary in order to manage security threats. Accordingly, execution-based bug assignment techniques, which model a bug with a faulty program execution, are an important tool in fixing software security bugs. In this thesis, we compare WhoseFault, an existing execution-based bug assignment technique, to report-based techniques. Additionally, we propose DR_BEV (Developer Recommendation Based on Executed Vocabulary), a novel execution-based technique that models developer expertise based on the vocabulary of each developer's source code contributions, and we demonstrate that this technique out-performs the current state-of-the-art execution-based technique. Our observations indicate that report-based techniques perform better than execution-based techniques, but not by a wide margin. Therefore, while a report-based technique should be used if a report exists for a bug, our results should provide confidence in the scenarios in which only execution-based techniques are applicable.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Bendelac, Alon

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Servant Cortes, Francisco Javier

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Meng, Na
• Balci, Osman

• Bug Assignment
• Bug Triage
• Security Vulnerability
• Information Extraction

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:25855

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/106700