An approach of method‐level bug localization

Bug localization is an important field in software engineering research. The traditional bug localization approaches based on information retrieval separate words through lexical analysis. In this way, the comments of the source code are ignored or treated as plain text, which will lose some semantic information. In this paper, MBL_SHL, an automatic Method‐level Bug Localization approach, which utilises code Summarization, Historical fixed bugs and code Length, is presented. Based on the code summarization technology, this approach first supplements the comment for uncommented code, and then calculates the Word2vec vector and Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency vector for the bug report, methods and comments, respectively. After that the authors calculate separately the similarity between the bug report and each method, the bug report and each comment. The code length information and historical fix information are also considered as a weight and a part of the score, respectively, to calculate the final score of each method. Finally, the scores are sorted to determine the list of methods that may need to be modified when fixing the software bugs. We built a method‐granular bug localization dataset, which contains five open‐source projects. The experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing approaches on the method level.