skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: A Comparative Study of Transformer-Based Neural Text Representation Techniques on Bug Triaging
Often, the first step in managing bug reports is related to triaging a bug to the appropriate developer who is best suited to understand, localize, and fix the target bug. Additionally, assigning a given bug to a particular part of a software project can help to expedite the fixing process. However, despite the importance of these activities, they are quite challenging, where days can be spent on the manual triaging process. Past studies have attempted to leverage the limited textual data of bug reports to train text classification models that automate this process -- to varying degrees of success. However, the textual representations and machine learning models used in prior work are limited by their expressiveness, often failing to capture nuanced textual patterns that might otherwise aid in the triaging process. Recently, large, transformer-based, pre-trained neural text representation techniques such as BERT have achieved greater performance in several natural language processing tasks. However, the potential for using these techniques to improve upon prior approaches for automated bug triaging is not well studied or understood. Therefore, in this paper we offer one of the first investigations that fine-tunes transformer-based language models for the task of bug triaging on four open source datasets, spanning a collective 53 years of development history with over 400 developers and over 150 software project components. Our study includes both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of effectiveness. Our findings illustrate that DeBERTa is the most effective technique across the triaging tasks of developer and component assignment, and the measured performance delta is statistically significant compared to other techniques. However, through our qualitative analysis, we also observe that each technique possesses unique abilities best suited to certain types of bug reports.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2132285 2423813 2311468
PAR ID:
10488070
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
ISBN:
979-8-3503-2996-4
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1012 to 1023
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE))
    One of the most important tasks related to managing bug reports is localizing the fault so that a fix can be applied. As such, prior work has aimed to automate this task of bug localization by formulating it as an information retrieval problem, where potentially buggy files are retrieved and ranked according to their textual similarity with a given bug report. However, there is often a notable semantic gap between the information contained in bug reports and identifiers or natural language contained within source code files. For user-facing software, there is currently a key source of information that could aid in bug localization, but has not been thoroughly investigated - information from the GUI. We investigate the hypothesis that, for end user-facing applications, connecting information in a bug report with information from the GUI, and using this to aid in retrieving potentially buggy files, can improve upon existing techniques for bug localization. To examine this phenomenon, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study that augments four baseline techniques for bug localization with GUI interaction information from a reproduction scenario to (i) filter out potentially irrelevant files, (ii) boost potentially relevant files, and (iii) reformulate text-retrieval queries. To carry out our study, we source the current largest dataset of fully-localized and reproducible real bugs for Android apps, with corresponding bug reports, consisting of 80 bug reports from 39 popular open-source apps. Our results illustrate that augmenting traditional techniques with GUI information leads to a marked increase in effectiveness across multiple metrics, including a relative increase in Hits@10 of 13-18%. Additionally, through further analysis, we find that our studied augmentations largely complement existing techniques. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; (, 19th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM))
    Information Retrieval (IR) plays a pivotal role indiverse Software Engineering (SE) tasks, e.g., bug localization and triaging, bug report routing, code retrieval, requirements analysis, etc. SE tasks operate on diverse types of documents including code, text, stack-traces, and structured, semi-structured and unstructured meta-data that often contain specialized vocabularies. As the performance of any IR-based tool critically depends on the underlying document types, and given the diversity of SE corpora, it is essential to understand which models work best for which types of SE documents and tasks.We empirically investigate the interaction between IR models and document types for two representative SE tasks (bug localization and relevant project search), carefully chosen as they require a diverse set of SE artifacts (mixtures of code and text),and confirm that the models’ performance varies significantly with mix of document types. Leveraging this insight, we propose a generalized framework, SRCH, to automatically select the most favorable IR model(s) for a given SE task. We evaluate SRCH w.r.t. these two tasks and confirm its effectiveness. Our preliminary user study shows that SRCH’s intelligent adaption of the IR model(s) to the task at hand not only improves precision and recall for SE tasks but may also improve users’ satisfaction. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology)
    The large demand of mobile devices creates significant concerns about the quality of mobile applications (apps). Developers heavily rely on bug reports in issue tracking systems to reproduce failures (e.g., crashes). However, the process of crash reproduction is often manually done by developers, making the resolution of bugs inefficient, especially given that bug reports are often written in natural language. To improve the productivity of developers in resolving bug reports, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach, called ReCDroid+, that can automatically reproduce crashes from bug reports for Android apps. ReCDroid+ uses a combination of natural language processing (NLP) , deep learning, and dynamic GUI exploration to synthesize event sequences with the goal of reproducing the reported crash. We have evaluated ReCDroid+ on 66 original bug reports from 37 Android apps. The results show that ReCDroid+ successfully reproduced 42 crashes (63.6% success rate) directly from the textual description of the manually reproduced bug reports. A user study involving 12 participants demonstrates that ReCDroid+ can improve the productivity of developers when resolving crash bug reports. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, IJCAI)
    null (Ed.)
    Bug localization plays an important role in software quality control. Many supervised machine learning models have been developed based on historical bug-fix information. Despite being successful, these methods often require sufficient historical data (i.e., labels), which is not always available especially for newly developed software projects. In response, cross-project bug localization techniques have recently emerged whose key idea is to transferring knowledge from label-rich source project to locate bugs in the target project. However, a major limitation of these existing techniques lies in that they fail to capture the specificity of each individual project, and are thus prone to negative transfer.To address this issue, we propose an adversarial transfer learning bug localization approach, focusing on only transferring the common characteristics (i.e., public information) across projects. Specifically, our approach (CooBa) learns the indicative public information from cross-project bug reports through a shared encoder, and extracts the private information from code files by an individual feature extractor for each project. CooBa further incorporates adversarial learning mechanism to ensure that public information shared between multiple projects could be effectively extracted. Extensive experiments on four large-scale real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed CooBa significantly outperforms the state of the art techniques. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM))
    Bug tracking systems, which help to track the reported software bugs, have been widely used in software development and maintenance. In these systems, recognizing relevant source files among a large number of source files for a given bug report is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task for software developers. To tackle this problem, information retrieval methods have been widely used to capture either the textual similarities or the semantic similarities between bug reports and source files. However, these two types of similarities are usually considered separately and the historical bug fixings are largely ignored by the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a supervised topic modeling method (STMLOCATOR) for automatically locating the relevant source files for a given bug report. In particular, the proposed model is built upon three key observations. First, supervised modeling can effectively make use of the existing fixing histories. Second, certain words in bug reports tend to appear multiple times in their relevant source files. Third, longer source files tend to have more bugs. By integrating the above three observations, the proposed STMLOCATOR utilizes historical fixings in a supervised way and learns both the textual similarities and semantic similarities between bug reports and source files. We further consider a special type of bug reports with stack-traces in bug reports, and propose a variant of STMLOCATOR to tailor for such bug reports. Experimental evaluations on three real data sets demonstrate that the proposed STMLOCATOR can achieve up to 23.6% improvement in terms of prediction accuracy over its best competitors, and scales linearly with the size of the data. Moreover, the proposed variant further improves STMLOCATOR by up to 76.2% on those bug reports with stack-traces. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email