A Contextual Approach towards More Accurate Duplicate Bug Report Detection
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Abstract
The issue-tracking systems used by software projects contain issues or bugs written by a wide variety of bug reporters, with different levels of knowledge about the system under development. Typically, reporters lack the skills and/or time to search the issue-tracking system for similar issues already reported. Hence, many reports end up referring to the same issue, which effectively makes the bug-report triaging process time consuming and error prone.
Many researchers have approached the bug-deduplication problem using off-the-shelf information-retrieval tools. In this thesis, we extend the state of the art by investigating how contextual information about software-quality attributes, software-architecture terms, and system-development topics can be exploited to improve bug-deduplication. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contextual bug-deduplication method on the bug repository of Android, Eclipse, Mozilla, and OpenOffice Software Systems. Based on this experience, we conclude that researchers should not ignore the context of the software engineering domain for deduplication.