BUTTER: An Approach to Bug Triage with Topic Modeling and Heterogeneous Network Analysis

When a bug is reported to the bug tracking system, it should be assigned to a developer responsible for its resolution after it is verified. This processing is also called bug triage. With increasing number of bug reports submitted to the bug tracking system, it is more and more difficult to assign appropriate developers to all the reported bugs manually. In this paper, we propose an approach called BUTTER (BUg Triage by topic modeling and heTERogeneous network analysis) to automatically assign bugs to developers. Different from other work, we regard that in most cases, bug resolution is a collaborative activity which involves many developers´ participation. Although social network analysis has been introduced to characterize the collaboration of developers, networks constructed by researchers are usually homogenous. That is, all the nodes and links in these networks are regarded as having same properties. Considering developers collaborated on different bugs, we construct a heterogeneous network that includes relationships between submitters, bugs and developers to characterize developers´ collaboration. Experiment shows that BUTTER outperforms other methods on automated bug triage.