Deep Neural Network-Based Severity Prediction of Bug Reports

Software maintenance is an essential phase of software development. Developers employ issue tracking systems to collect bugs for software improvement. Users submit bugs through such issue tracking systems and decide the severity of reported bugs. The severity is an important attribute of a bug that decides how quickly it should be solved. It helps developers to solve important bugs on time. However, manual severity assessment is a tedious job and could be incorrect. To this end, in this paper, we propose a deep neural network-based automatic approach for the severity prediction of bug reports. First, we apply natural language processing techniques for text preprocessing of bug reports. Second, we compute and assign an emotion score for each bug report. Third, we create a vector for each preprocessed bug report. Forth, we pass the constructed vector and the emotion score of each bug report to a deep neural network based classifier for severity prediction. We also evaluate the proposed approach on the history-data of bug reports. The results of cross-product suggest that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. On average, it improves the f-measure by 7.90%.