Effective Prediction of Bug-Fixing Priority via Weighted Graph Convolutional Networks

With the increasing number of software bugs, bug fixing plays an important role in software development and maintenance. To improve the efficiency of bug resolution, developers utilize bug reports to resolve given bugs. Especially, bug triagers usually depend on bugs’ descriptions to suggest priority levels for reported bugs. However, manual priority assignment is a time-consuming and cumbersome task. To resolve this problem, recent studies have proposed many approaches to automatically predict the priority levels for the reported bugs. Unfortunately, these approaches still face two challenges that include words’ nonconsecutive semantics in bug reports and the imbalanced data. In this article, we propose a novel approach that graph convolutional networks (GCN) based on weighted loss function to perform the priority prediction for bug reports. For the first challenge, we build a heterogeneous text graph for bug reports and apply GCN to extract words’ semantics in bug reports. For the second challenge, we construct a weighted loss function in the training phase. We conduct the priority prediction on four open-source projects, including Mozilla, Eclipse, Netbeans, and GNU compiler collection. Experimental results show that our method outperforms two baseline approaches in terms of the F-measure by weighted average of 13.22%.