The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Where should the bugs be fixed? More accurate information retrieval-based bug localization based on bug reports
Abstract
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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2 of the 38 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Zhou, J., Zhang, H., & Lo, D.
- Affiliations
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Singapore Management University (SG)
- Venue
- 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2012-06
- Pages
- 14-24
- ISSN
- 0270-5257 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3149255455
- Cited by
- 507
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2026: 26 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 53 · 2022: 57 · 2021: 58 · 2020: 42 · 2019: 41 · 2018: 28 · 2017: 39 · 2016: 27 · 2015: 31 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 17.86
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Tsinghua University
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- bug localization, bug reports, information retrieval, text similarity, eclipses, open source software
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