Combining rule-based and information retrieval techniques to assign software change requests
Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, Ivan Machado, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Sílvio Romero de Lemos Meira · 2014
Change Requests (CRs) are key elements to software maintenance and evolution. Finding the appropriate developer to a CR is crucial for obtaining the lowest, economically feasible, fixing time. Nevertheless, assigning CRs is a labor-intensive and time consuming task. In this paper, we present a semi-automated CR assignment approach which combine rule-based and information retrieval techniques. The approach emphasizes the use of contextual information, essential to effective assignments, and puts the development team in control of the assignment rules, toward making its adoption easier. Results of an empirical evaluation showed that the approach is up to 46,5% more accurate than approaches which rely solely on machine learning techniques.