Utilizing Topic-Based Similar Commit Information and CNN-LSTM Algorithm for Bug Localization

Abstract

With the use of increasingly complex software, software bugs are inevitable. Software developers rely on bug reports to identify and fix these issues. In this process, developers inspect suspected buggy source code files, relying heavily on a bug report. This process is often time-consuming and increases the cost of software maintenance. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel bug localization method using topic-based similar commit information. First, the method determines similar topics for a given bug report. Then, it extracts similar bug reports and similar commit information for these topics. To extract similar bug reports on a topic, a similarity measure is calculated for a given bug report. In the process, for a given bug report and source code, features shared by similar source codes are classified and extracted; combining these features improves the method’s performance. The extracted features are presented to the convolutional neural network’s long short-term memory algorithm for model training. Finally, when a bug report is submitted to the model, a suspected buggy source code file is detected and recommended. To evaluate the performance of our method, a baseline performance comparison was conducted using code from open-source projects. Our method exhibits good performance.