On the Effects of File-level Information on Method-level Bug Localization

摘要

CONTEXT: Automated bug localization is expected to help developers reducing effort and has been studied for years. One of the major approaches for this topic is Information Retrieval (IR) based bug localization. It takes a bug report and gives a ranking list of suspicious software modules based on the text similarity. Method-level bug localization is more desirable than file-level to reduce developers’ cost to examine the ranking list. A challenge is that methods have little information inside. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether method-level bug localization can be improved with file-level information around a method. METHOD: An empirical evaluation was conducted with public data sets. A bug localization method BLUiR was used as a testbed. RESULTS: We found the class name of a method contributed to improving method-level bug localization. The comments outside the method often improved the performance but sometimes degraded it. The other elements hardly improved the performance. CONCLUSIONS: It is worth to add the class name for improving method-level bug localization. The comments are also worth trying.