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Improving bug triage with bug tossing graphs

Published:24 August 2009Publication History

ABSTRACT

bug report is typically assigned to a single developer who is then responsible for fixing the bug. In Mozilla and Eclipse, between 37%-44% of bug reports are "tossed" (reassigned) to other developers, for example because the bug has been assigned by accident or another developer with additional expertise is needed. In any case, tossing increases the time-to-correction for a bug.

In this paper, we introduce a graph model based on Markov chains, which captures bug tossing history. This model has several desirable qualities. First, it reveals developer networks which can be used to discover team structures and to find suitable experts for a new task. Second, it helps to better assign developers to bug reports. In our experiments with 445,000 bug reports, our model reduced tossing events, by up to 72%. In addition, the model increased the prediction accuracy by up to 23 percentage points compared to traditional bug triaging approaches.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        ESEC/FSE '09: Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
        August 2009
        408 pages
        ISBN:9781605580012
        DOI:10.1145/1595696

        Copyright © 2009 ACM

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        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 24 August 2009

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        ESEC/FSE '09 Paper Acceptance Rate32of217submissions,15%Overall Acceptance Rate112of543submissions,21%

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