Bug report summarization using multi-view multi-objective optimization framework

Abstract

Existing bug text reports are widely used by software engineers to assist them in understanding important components of individual defects and adjustments done to resolve the fault. However, bug reports are typically long and require significant effort to comprehend. Summarization of bug reports appears to be beneficial in this regard, covering essential and diverse information. We frame the Bug report summarization problem as a clustering-based optimization problem and solve it using a multi-view multi-objective optimization framework. To represent the bug reports, semantic and syntactic representations, which are regarded as separate views, are taken into account. Several cluster quality measures computed on partitionings obtained using distinct views are optimized simultaneously using a multi-objective optimization-based approach known as archived multi-objective simulated annealing. To determine the consensus between the partitionings generated using different views, an agreement index is computed, which is also optimized simultaneously along with other cluster quality measures. The proposed methodology automatically determines the number of clusters. The experiments are carried out using the two benchmark datasets (SDS and ADS) and evaluated using the well-known ROUGE, Precision, Recall, and F-measure evaluation metrics. The obtained results show that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methods.