Bench4BL: Reproducibility study on the performance of IR-based bug localization

Jaekwon Lee, Dongsun Kim, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Woosung Jung, Yves Le Traon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

66 Scopus citations

Abstract

In recent years, the use of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to automate the localization of buggy files, given a bug report, has shown promising results. The abundance of approaches in the literature, however, contrasts with the reality of IR-based bug localization (IRBL) adoption by developers (or even by the research community to complement other research approaches). Presumably, this situation is due to the lack of comprehensive evaluations for state-of-the-art approaches which offer insights into the actual performance of the techniques. We report on a comprehensive reproduction study of six stateof-the-art IRBL techniques. This study applies not only subjects used in existing studies (old subjects) but also 46 new subjects (61,431 Java files and 9,459 bug reports) to the IRBL techniques. In addition, the study compares two different version matching (between bug reports and source code files) strategies to highlight our observations related to performance deterioration.We also vary test file inclusion to investigate the effectiveness of IRBL techniques on test files, or its noise impact on performance. Finally, we assess potential performance gain if duplicate bug reports are leveraged.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationISSTA 2018 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
EditorsEric Bodden, Frank Tip
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages61-72
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356992
DOIs
StatePublished - 12 Jul 2018
Event27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2018 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 16 Jul 201821 Jul 2018

Publication series

NameISSTA 2018 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Conference

Conference27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2018
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period16/07/1821/07/18

Keywords

  • Bug localization
  • Information retrieval
  • Reproducibility studies

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