Bug Prioritization to Facilitate Bug Report Triage

The large number of new bug reports received in bug repositories of software systems makes their management a challenging task. Handling these reports manually is time consuming, and often results in delaying the resolution of important bugs. To address this issue, a recommender may be developed which automatically prioritizes the new bug reports. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a classification based approach to build such a recommender. We use the Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers, and present a comparison to evaluate which classifier performs better in terms of accuracy. Since a bug report contains both categorical and text features, another evaluation we perform is to determine the combination of features that better determines the priority of a bug. To evaluate the bug priority recommender, we use precision and recall measures and also propose two new measures, Nearest False Negatives (NFN) and Nearest False Positives (NFP), which provide insight into the results produced by precision and recall. Our findings are that the results of SVM are better than the Naïve Bayes algorithm for text features, whereas for categorical features, Naïve Bayes performance is better than SVM. The highest accuracy is achieved with SVM when categorical and text features are combined for training.