Why So Complicated? Simple Term Filtering and Weighting for Location-Based Bug Report Assignment Recommendation

Large software development projects receive many
bug reports and each of these reports needs to be triaged. An
important step in the triage process is the assignment of the
report to a developer. Most previous eorts towards improving
bug report assignment have focused on using an activity-based
approach. We address some of the limitations of activity-based
approaches by proposing a two-phased location-based approach
where bug report assignment recommendations are based on the
predicted location of the bug. The proposed approach utilizes
a noun extraction process on several information sources to
determine bug location information and a simple term weighting
scheme to provide a bug report assignment recommendation.
We found that by using a location-based approach, we achieved
an accuracy of 89.41% and 59.76% when recommending five
developers for the Eclipse and Mozilla projects, respectively.