Stopping duplicate bug reports before they start with Continuous Querying for bug reports
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Software Engineering
- Keywords
- bug report deduplication, duplicate bug report detection
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hindle
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Stopping duplicate bug reports before they start with Continuous Querying for bug reports. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2373v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2373v1
Abstract
Bug deduplication is a hot topic in software engineering information retrieval research, but it is often not deployed. Typically to de-duplicate bug reports developers rely upon the search capabilities of the bug report software they employ, such as Bugzilla, Jira, or Github Issues. These search capabilities range from simple SQL string search to IR-based word indexing methods employed by search engines. Yet too often these searches do very little to stop the creation of duplicate bug reports. Some bug trackers have more than 10\% of their bug reports marked as duplicate. Perhaps these bug tracker search engines are not enough? In this paper we propose a method of attempting to prevent duplicate bug reports before they start: continuous querying. That is as the bug reporter types in their bug report their text is used to query the bug database to find duplicate or related bug reports. This continuous querying allows the reporter to be alerted to duplicate bug reports as they report the bug, rather than formulating queries to find the duplicate bug report. Thus this work ushers in a new way of evaluating bug report deduplication techniques, as well as a new kind of bug deduplication task. We show that simple IR measures show some promise for addressing this problem but also that further research is needed to refine this novel process that is integrate-able into modern bug report systems.
Author Comment
Why wait till your bug report is written to find a duplicate bug report? Find duplicate bug reports as you write your bug report! This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.