LCBPA: An Enhanced Deep Neural Network-Oriented Bug Prioritization and Assignment Technique Using Content-Based Filtering

Abstract

Software maintenance is an important phase of a development life cycle that needs to be essentially performed in order to avoid the software failure. To systematically handle the bugs (defects), the software development organization develops a bug report that demonstrates the vulnerabilities from the software under test. However, manually handling the bug reports is a laborious, tedious, and time-consuming task. Moreover, the bug repository receives large numbers of bug reports on daily basis, which demands to timely fix the found and received bugs. Motivated by this, current work proposes an automated bug prioritization and assignment technique, called LCBPA (Long short-term memory, Content-based filtering for Bug Prioritization and Assignment). To perform the bug prioritization, we employed Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to predict the priority of the bug report. In contrast, for bug assignment, we used content-based filtering, where the prioritized bug reports are automatically assigned to the developers based on their previous knowledge. The performance of the proposed bug prioritization model is determined by comparing with the state-of-the-art bug prioritization techniques, and measured using the evaluation metrics including Precision, Recall and F1-score. Similarly, the effectiveness of the bug assignment model is evaluated by defining various case scenarios. The results show that the proposed LCBPA technique outperforms the current state-of-the-art bug prioritization techniques (with a 22% increase in F1-score), and also efficiently handles the bug assignment problem compared to the existing bug assignment techniques.

Keywords

• Software maintenance
• bug report
• bug prioritization
• bug assignment
• deep learning