Optimizing bug report assignment using multi criteria decision making technique

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Goyal, Anjali^* | Sardana, Neetu

Affiliations: Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Uttar Pradesh, India

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Anjali Goyal, Department of CSE, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Sector-62, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. Tel.: +91 98 1164 9065; E-mail: anjaligoyal19@yahoo.in.

Abstract: Bug report assignment is an integral part of bug triaging process. It aims at assigning a suitable developer for the reported bug. The assigned developer edits the source code in order to resolve the bug. Existing bug assignment techniques use different bug report parameters for selection of suitable developer. In the literature, bug report parameters are always weighed equally for developer selection. However, each parameter has varying importance among themselves. Thus, it would be beneficial to assign varying weights to the bug report parameters. This paper presents a novel Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based bug assignment technique, W8Prioritizer, that prioritizes bug report parameters on the basis of their relative importance before making the developer assignment. The experimental results show an improved accuracy for the AHP based bug assignment approach. The proposed approach achieves 70.59% and 86.15% accuracy in Mozilla and Eclipse projects respectively for top-10 list size in comparison to accuracy of 50% and 47.58% for baseline term frequency approach.

Keywords: Bug triaging, bug report assignment, developer ranking, MCDM, AHP

DOI: 10.3233/IDT-170297

Journal: Intelligent Decision Technologies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 307-320, 2017