On Using GUI Interaction Data to Improve Text Retrieval-based Bug Localization
Junayed Mahmud, Nadeeshan De Silva, Safwat Ali Khan, Seyed Hooman Mostafavi, S M Hasan Mansur, Oscar Chaparro, Andrian Marcus, Kevin Moran
Abstract
One of the most important tasks related to managing bug reports is localizing the fault so that a fix can be applied. As such, prior work has aimed to automate this task of bug localization by formulating it as an information retrieval problem, where potentially buggy files are retrieved and ranked according to their textual similarity with a given bug report. However, there is often a notable semantic gap between the information contained in bug reports and identifiers or natural language contained within source code files. For user-facing software, there is currently a key source of information that could aid in bug localization, but has not been thoroughly investigated - information from the graphical user interface (GUI).