For a large and evolving software system, the project team could receive a large number of bug reports. Locating the source code files that need to be changed in order to fix the bugs is a challenging task. Once a bug report is received, it is desirable to automatically point out to the files that developers should change in order to fix the bug. In this paper, we propose BugLocator, an information retrieval based method for locating the relevant files for fixing a bug. BugLocator ranks all files based on the textual similarity between the initial bug report and the source code using a revised Vector Space Model (rVSM), taking into consideration information about similar bugs that have been fixed before. We perform large-scale experiments on four open source projects to localize more than 3,000 bugs. The results show that BugLocator can effectively locate the files where the bugs should be fixed. For example, relevant buggy files for 62.60% Eclipse 3.1 bugs are ranked in the top ten among 12,863 files. Our experiments also show that BugLocator outperforms existing state-of-the-art bug localization methods.
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