Potential biases in bug localization

Abstract

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and fix them. To mitigate this problem, past studies have proposed information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization techniques, which takes as input a textual description of a bug stored in an issue tracking system, and returns a list of potentially buggy source code files.