Multi‐graph learning‐based software defect location

Abstract

AbstractSoftware quality is key to the success of software systems. Modern software systems are growing in their worth based on industry needs and becoming more complex, which inevitably increases the possibility of more defects in software systems. Software repairing is time‐consuming, especially locating the source files related to specific software defect reports. To locate defective source files more quickly and accurately, automated software defect location technology is generated and has a huge application value. The existing deep learning‐based software defect location method focuses on extracting the semantic correlation between the source file and the corresponding defect reports. However, the extensive code structure information contained in the source files is ignored. To this end, we propose a software defect location method, namely, multi‐graph learning‐based software defect location (MGSDL). By extracting the program dependency graphs for functions, each source file is converted into a graph bag containing multiple graphs (i.e., multi‐graph). Further, a multi‐graph learning method is proposed, which learns code structure information from multi‐graph to establish the semantic association between source files and software defect reports. Experiments' results on four publicly available datasets, AspectJ, Tomcat, Eclipse UI, and SWT, show that MGSDL improves on average 3.88%, 5.66%, 13.23%, 9.47%, and 3.26% over the competitive methods in five evaluation metrics, rank@10, rank@5, MRR, MAP, and AUC, respectively.