APPLICATION OF EXPLAINABLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN SOFTWARE BUG CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

Fault management is an expensive process and analyzing data manually requires a lot of resources. Modern software bug tracking systems may be armed with automated bug report assignment functionality that facilitates bug classification or bug assignment to proper development group. For supporting decision systems, it would be beneficial to introduce information related to explainability. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the use of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in processes related to software development and bug classification based on bug reports created by either software testers or software users. The research was conducted on two different datasets. The first one is related to classification of security vs non-security bug reports. It comes from a telecommunication company which develops software and hardware solutions for mobile operators. The second dataset contains a list of software bugs taken from an opensource project. In this dataset the task is to classify issues with one of following labels crash, memory, performance, and security. Studies on XAI-related algorithms show that there are no major differences in the results of the algorithms used when comparing them with others. Therefore, not only the users can obtain results with possible explanations or experts can verify model or its part before introducing into production, but also it does not provide degradation of accuracy. Studies showed that it could be put into practice, but it has not been done so far.

Keywords

• software bug assignment
• software bug triaging
• explainable artificial intelligence
• text analysis
• vulnerability