DECOBA: Utilizing Developers Communities in Bug Assignment

Bug Tracking System (BTS) is publically accessible which enables geographically distributed developers to follow the work of each other and contribute in bug fixing. Developer interactions through commenting on bug reports generate a developer social network that can be used to improve software development and maintenance activities. In large scale complex software projects, software maintenance requires larger groups to participate in its activities. Most previous bug assignments approaches assign only one developer to new bugs. However, bug fixing is a collaborative effort between several developers (i.e., many developers contribute their experience in fixing a bug report). In this work, we build developers social networks based on developers comments on bug reports and detect developers communities. We also assign a relevant community to each newly committed bug report. Moreover, we rank developers in each community based on their experience. An experimental evaluation is conducted on three open source projects namely NetBeans, Freedesktop, and Mandriva. The results show that the detected communities are significantly connected with high density. They also show that the proposed approach achieves feasible accuracy of bug assignment.