Many projects often receive more bug reports than what they can handle. To help debug and close bug reports, a number of bug localization techniques have been proposed. These techniques analyze a bug report and return a ranked list of potentially buggy source code files. Recent development on bug localization has resulted in the construction of effective supervised approaches that use historical data of manually localized bugs to boost performance. Unfortunately, as highlighted by Zimmermann et al., sufficient bug data is often unavailable for many projects and companies. This raises the need for cross-project bug localization - the use of data from a project to help locate bugs in another project. To fill this need, we propose a deep transfer learning approach for cross-project bug localization. Our proposed approach named TRANP-CNN extracts transferable semantic features from source project and fully exploits labeled data from target project for effective cross-project bug localization. We have evaluated TRANP-CNN on curated high-quality bug datasets and our experimental results show that TRANP-CNN can locate buggy files correctly at top 1, top 5, and top 10 positions for 29.9, 51.7, 61.3 percent of the bugs respectively, which significantly outperform state-of-the-art bug localization solution based on deep learning and several other advanced alternative solutions considering various standard evaluation metrics.

During software maintenance, bug report is an effective way to identify potential bugs hidden in a software system. It is a great challenge to automatically locate the potential buggy source code according to a bug report. Traditional approaches usually represent bug reports and source code from a lexical perspective to measure their similarities. Recently, some deep learning models are proposed to learn the unified features by exploiting the local and sequential nature, which overcomes the difficulty in modeling the difference between natural and programming languages. However, only considering local and sequential information from one dimension is not enough to represent the semantics, some multi-dimension information such as structural and functional nature that carries additional semantics has not been well-captured. Such information beyond the lexical and structural terms is extremely vital in modeling program functionalities and behaviors, leading to a better representation for identifying buggy source code. In this paper, we propose a novel model named CG-CNN, which is a multi-instance learning framework that enhances the unified features for bug localization by exploiting structural and sequential nature from the control flow graph. Experimental results on widely-used software projects demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CG-CNN model.

Code review is the process of manual inspection on the revision of the source code in order to find out whether the revised source code eventually meets the revision requirements. However, manual code review is time-consuming, and automating such the code review process will alleviate the burden of code reviewers and speed up the software maintenance process. To construct the model for automatic code review, the characteristics of the revisions of source code (i.e., the difference between the two pieces of source code) should be properly captured and modeled. Unfortunately, most of the existing techniques can easily model the overall correlation between two pieces of source code, but not for the “difference” between two pieces of source code. In this paper, we propose a novel deep model named DACE for automatic code review. Such a model is able to learn revision features by contrasting the revised hunks from the original and revised source code with respect to the code context containing the hunks. Experimental results on six open source software projects indicate by learning the revision features, DACE can outperform the competing approaches in automatic code review.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is essential in software development and many defect prediction methods based on machine learning have been proposed to identify defective modules. However, most existing defect prediction models do not provide good defect prediction results, and the semantic features reflecting the detective patterns may not be well-captured via traditional feature extraction methods. More information such as code comments should be also be embedded to generate semantic features respecting the source code functionality. Therefore, how to embed code comments for defect prediction is a big challenge, and another problem is that many comments of source code are missing in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel defect prediction model named CAP-CNN (Convolutional Neural Network for Comments Augmented Programs), which is a deep learning model that automatically embeds code comments in generating semantic features from the source code for software defect prediction. To overcome the missing comments problem, a novel training strategy is used in CAP-CNN that the network encodes and absorb comments information to generate semantic features automatically during training process, which does not need testing modules to contain comments. Experimental results on several widely-used software data sets indicate that the comment features are able to improve defect prediction performance.

Bug tracking systems, which help to track the reported software bugs, have been widely used in software development and maintenance. In these systems, recognizing relevant source files among a large number of source files for a given bug report is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task for software developers. To tackle this problem, information retrieval methods have been widely used to capture either the textual similarities or the semantic similarities between bug reports and source files. However, these two types of similarities are usually considered separately and the historical bug fixings are largely ignored by the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a supervised topic modeling method (STMLOCATOR) for automatically locating the relevant source files for a given bug report. In particular, the proposed model is built upon three key observations. First, supervised modeling can effectively make use of the existing fixing histories. Second, certain words in bug reports tend to appear multiple times in their relevant source files. Third, longer source files tend to have more bugs. By integrating the above three observations, the proposed STMLOCATOR utilizes historical fixings in a supervised way and learns both the textual similarities and semantic similarities between bug reports and source files. We further consider a special type of bug reports with stack-traces in bug reports, and propose a variant of STMLOCATOR to tailor for such bug reports. Experimental evaluations on three real data sets demonstrate that the proposed STMLOCATOR can achieve up to 23.6% improvement in terms of prediction accuracy over its best competitors, and scales linearly with the size of the data. Moreover, the proposed variant further improves STMLOCATOR by up to 76.2% on those bug reports with stack-traces.

Bug reports provide an effective way for end-users to disclose potential bugs hidden in a software system, while automatically locating the potential buggy source files according to a bug report remains a great challenge in software maintenance. Many previous approaches represent bug reports and source code from lexical and structural information correlated their relevance by measuring their similarity, and recently a CNN-based model is proposed to learn the unified features for bug localization, which overcomes the difficulty in modeling natural and programming languages with different structural semantics. However, previous studies fail to capture the sequential nature of source code, which carries additional semantics beyond the lexical and structural terms and such information is vital in modeling program functionalities and behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel model LS-CNN, which enhances the unified features by exploiting the sequential nature of source code. LS-CNN combines CNN and LSTM to extract semantic features for automatically identifying potential buggy source code according to a bug report. Experimental results on widely-used software projects indicate that LS-CNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in locating buggy files.