Automatically Selecting Follow-up Questions for Deficient Bug Reports
Automatically Selecting Follow-up Questions for Deficient Bug Reports
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DOI：
10.1109/msr52588.2021.00029
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发表时间：
2021-05
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
M. M. Imran-M.;Agnieszka Ciborowska;Kostadin Damevski
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文献类型：
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作者：
M. M. Imran-M.;Agnieszka Ciborowska;Kostadin Damevski
软件用户每天创建的错误报告中质量信息的可用性是快速修复软件故障的关键。改善不完整或不足的错误报告，这些报告在许多流行且积极开发的开源软件项目中都有很多，可以使软件维护更加有效并提高软件质量。在本文中，我们提出了一个系统，该系统通过自动提出后续问题来解决错误报告不完整的问题，旨在引起答案，以增加价值并为错误报告提供丢失的信息。我们的系统基于从GitHub上已经发布的后续问题中选择的后续问题。为了估算特定缺陷错误报告的最佳后续问题，我们基于以下方式组合了两个指标：1）后续问题与特定错误报告的兼容性； 2）实用程序对后续问题的预期答案将为不足的错误报告提供。基于手动注释的持有数据集的评估我们的系统表明，对一组简单和消融基线的性能提高了。一项软件开发人员的调查确认了持有的套装评估结果，即所选的后续问题中约有一半被认为有效。该调查还表明，有效的后续问题很有用，并且可以在大多数时候为错误报告提供新信息，并且在某些时候特定于错误报告。
The availability of quality information in bug reports that are created daily by software users is key to rapidly fixing software faults. Improving incomplete or deficient bug reports, which are numerous in many popular and actively developed open source software projects, can make software maintenance more effective and improve software quality. In this paper, we propose a system that addresses the problem of bug report incompleteness by automatically posing follow-up questions, intended to elicit answers that add value and provide missing information to a bug report. Our system is based on selecting follow-up questions from a large corpus of already posted follow-up questions on GitHub. To estimate the best follow-up question for a specific deficient bug report we combine two metrics based on: 1) the compatibility of a follow-up question to a specific bug report; and 2) the utility the expected answer to the follow-up question would provide to the deficient bug report. Evaluation of our system, based on a manually annotated held-out data set, indicates improved performance over a set of simple and ablation baselines. A survey of software developers confirms the held-out set evaluation result that about half of the selected follow-up questions are considered valid. The survey also indicates that the valid follow-up questions are useful and can provide new information to a bug report most of the time, and are specific to a bug report some of the time.