Using Co-change Histories to Improve Bug Localization Performance

A large open source software (OSS) project receives many bug reports on a daily basis. Bug localization techniques automatically pinpoint source code fragments that are relevant to a bug report, thus enabling faster correction. Even though many bug localization methods have been introduced, their performance is still not efficient. In this research, we improved on existing bug localization methods by taking into account co-change histories. We conducted experiments on two OSS datasets, the Eclipse SWT 3.1 project and the Android ZXing project. We validated our approach by evaluating effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art approach Bug Locator. In the Eclipse SWT 3.1 project, our approach reliably identified source code that should be fixed for a bug in 72.46% of the total bugs, while Bug Locator identified only 51.02%. In the Android ZXing project, our approach identified 85.71%, while Bug Locator identified 60%.