Recommending similar bugs to software maintainers

Abstract

Bug handling represents a major effort in software projects. In this thesis, we propose a recommender that suggests similar bugs that a developer can fix after working on a giving bug. First, we characterize the workflows followed by developers when fixing bugs in the Firefox browser and we identify an opportunity to use recommendations of similar bugs in this process. Second, we evaluate the proposed recommender, called NextBug, using past bugs from the Mozilla ecosystem. We compare the results with a state-of-the-art technique for detecting duplicated bugs. The results show that NextBug performs just as well as this more complex technique. Finally, we report a field study where we monitored the bugs fixed for Mozilla during a week. We sent mails to the developers who fixed these bugs; 39 developers (59%) stated that they would consider working on the recommendations provided by NextBug; 44 developers (67%) expressed interest in seeing NextBug installed in their bug tracking system.