A Unified Framework for Bug Report Assignment

It is typically a manual, time-consuming, and tedious task of assigning bug reports to individual developers. Although some machine learning techniques are adopted to alleviate this dilemma, they are mainly focused on the open source projects, which use traditional repositories such as Bugzilla to manage their bug reports. With the boom of the mobile Internet, some new requirements and methods of software testing are emerging, especially the crowdsourced testing. Unlike the traditional channels, whose bug reports are often heavyweight, which means their bug reports are standardized with detailed attribute localization, bug reports tend to be lightweight in the context of crowdsourced testing. To exploit the differences of the bug reports assignment in the new settings, a unified bug reports assignment framework is proposed in this paper. This framework is capable of handling both the traditional heavyweight bug reports and the lightweight ones by (i) first preprocessing the bug reports and feature selections, (ii) then tuning the parameters that indicate the ratios of choosing different methods to vectorize bug reports, (iii) and finally applying classification algorithms to assign bug reports. Extensive experiments are conducted on three datasets to evaluate the proposed framework. The results indicate the applicability of the proposed framework, and also reveal the differences of bug report assignment between traditional repositories and crowdsourced ones.