Why so complicated? Simple term filtering and weighting for location-based bug report assignment recommendation

Abstract

Large software development projects receive many bug reports and each of these reports needs to be triaged. An important step in the triage process is the assignment of the report to a developer. Most previous efforts towards improving bug report assignment have focused on using an activity-based approach. We address some of the limitations of activity-based approaches by proposing a two-phased location-based approach where bug report assignment recommendations are based on the predicted location of the bug. The proposed approach utilizes a noun extraction process on several information sources to determine bug location information and a simple term weighting scheme to provide a bug report assignment recommendation. We found that by using a location-based approach, we achieved an accuracy of 89.41% and 59.76% when recommending five developers for the Eclipse and Mozilla projects, respectively.