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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. 

Business rules are an important part of the requirements of software systems that are meant to support an organization. These rules describe the operations, definitions, and constraints that apply to the organization. Within the software system, business rules are often translated into constraints on the values that are required or allowed for data, called data constraints. Business rules are subject to frequent changes, which in turn require changes to the corresponding data constraints in the software. The ability to efficiently and precisely identify where data constraints are implemented in the source code is essential for performing such necessary changes.</p> In this paper, we introduce Lasso, the first technique that automatically retrieves the method and line of code where a given data constraint is enforced. Lasso is based on traceability link recovery approaches and leverages results from recent research that identified line-of-code level implementation patterns for data constraints. We implement three versions of Lasso that can retrieve data constraint implementations when they are implemented with any one of 13 frequently occurring patterns. We evaluate the three versions on a set of 299 data constraints from 15 real-world Java systems, and find that they improve method-level link recovery by 30%, 70%, and 163%, in terms of true positives within the first 10 results, compared to their text-retrieval-based baseline. More importantly, the Lasso variants correctly identify the line of code implementing the constraint inside the methods for 68% of the 299 constraints.</p> 

Replication package for eponymous EMSE article.</p>