CrossFix: Resolution of GitHub issues via similar bugs recommendation

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of Open-Source Software (OSS), the number of GitHub issues reported daily in these OSS projects has been growing rapidly. To resolve these issues, developers need to spend time and effort in debugging and fixing these issues. Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across different projects, and one could use the GitHub issues from a different project for finding new bugs for a related project. To locate similar bugs for our approach, we first conduct a study of similar bugs in GitHub. Our study redefines similar bugs as bugs that share the (1) same libraries, (2) same functionalities, (3) same reproduction steps, (4) same configurations, (5) same outcomes, or (6) same errors. Moreover, our study revealed the usefulness of similar bugs in helping developers to find more contexts about the bug and fixing. Based on our study, we design CrossFix, a tool that automatically suggests relevant GitHub issues based on an open GitHub issue. The suggested GitHub issues may contain solutions written in natural language or pull requests that help developers in resolving the given issue. Our evaluation on 249 open issues from Java and Android projects shows that CrossFix could suggest similar bugs to help developers in debugging and fixing.