Nature-Based Prediction Model of Bug Reports Based on Ensemble Machine Learning Model

Abstract

In software development systems, the maintenance process of software systems attracted the attention of researchers due to its importance in fixing the defects discovered in the software testing by using bug reports (BRs) which include detailed information like description, status, reporter, assignee, priority, and severity of the bug and other information. The main problem in this process is how to analyze these BRs to discover all defects in the system, which is a tedious and time-consuming task if done manually because the number of BRs increases dramatically. Thus, the automated solution is the best. Most of the current research focuses on automating this process from different aspects, such as detecting the severity or priority of the bug. However, they did not consider the nature of the bug, which is a multi-class classification problem. This paper solves this problem by proposing a new prediction model to analyze BRs and predict the nature of the bug. The proposed model constructs an ensemble machine learning algorithm using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques. We simulate the proposed model by using a publicly available dataset for two online software bug repositories (Mozilla and Eclipse), which includes six classes: Program Anomaly, GUI, Network or Security, Configuration, Performance, and Test-Code. The simulation results show that the proposed model can achieve better accuracy than most existing models, namely, 90.42% without text augmentation and 96.72% with text augmentation.