Exploring the influence of time factor in bug report prioritization

Abstract

Time factor has been widely applied into a wide range of data mining areas, such as social network and information retrieval. The main idea of taking time factor into consideration is that human activities may have some relations to time pattern. However, little attention has been pulled on the study of time factor in the area of software engineering. In this paper, we endeavour to explore to what extent time factor affects the prioritization of bug reports, a specified while important task in software engineering. Specifically, we test four time factors that may have some influence on this task, which are time of day, normal time, day of week, and days to major version. After the validation of relatedness of all these factors, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on two datasets to verify the effectiveness of these factors. The experimental results demonstrate that we can effectively improve the results by metrics of both Precision and Recall, on two classical models, i.e., the SVM model and Naive Bayes model.