Exploring Metadata in Bug Reports for Bug Localization

摘要

Information retrieval methods have been proposed to help developers locate related buggy source files for a given bug report. The basic assumption of these methods is that the bug description in a bug report should be textually similar to its buggy source files. However, the metadata (such as the component and version information) in bug reports is largely ignored by these methods. In this paper, we propose to explore the metadata for the bug localization task. In particular, we first apply a generative model to locate buggy source files based on the bug descriptions, and then propose to add the available metadata in bug reports into the localization process. Experimental evaluations on several software projects indicate that the metadata is useful to improve the localization accuracy and that the proposed bug localization method outperforms several existing methods.