How to Provide Developers Only with Relevant Information?
Stefan Räbiger, Ataman Girisken, Cemal Yılmaz · 2016
After the release of a new software version it isdifficult for individual developers to keep track of all newlysubmitted bug reports complicating their decision making, e.g., which bug to resolve next? This problem is emphasized by thepresence of further information sources, such as social media, which offer valuable user feedback to developers regardingthe software. However, due to an abundant amount of infor-mation, developers might never notice this feedback. Hence, we envision a real-time system that provides developers withrelevant information for improving the quality of their systemwhile filtering out irrelevant facts from multiple informationsources. For this system to work, it is necessary to computethe similarity between different types of documents, e.g., tweetsand bug reports, in order to detect whether they are relevantto a developer or not. In this feasibility study, we focus onanalyzing this core assumption in a simplified scenario inwhich we identify related bugs for a given software fix withthe help of Natural Language Processing methods. In thisexperimental setting, which exhibits the key characteristics ofour envisioned system, we obtain promising results indicatingthat our approach is feasible.