In this work, we developed, integrated, and tested a feature that automatically highlights potentially important frames in stack traces. The feature was implemented in the internal bug-processing tool at JetBrains that processed tens of millions of stack traces. We surveyed 18 developers at JetBrains who provided valuable feedback.

In large-scale software systems, there are often no fully-fledged bug reports with human-written descriptions when an error occurs. In this case, developers rely on stack traces, i.e., series of function calls that led to the error. Since there can be tens and hundreds of thousands of them describing the same issue from different users, automatic deduplication into categories is necessary to allow for processing. Recent works have proposed powerful deep learning-based approaches for this, but they are evaluated and compared in isolation from real-life workflows, and it is not clear whether they will actually work well at scale. To overcome this gap, this work presents three main contributions: a novel model, an industry-based dataset, and a multi-faceted evaluation. Our model consists of two parts - (1) an embedding model with byte-pair encoding and approximate nearest neighbor search to quickly find the most relevant stack traces to the incoming one, and (2) a reranker that re-ranks the most fitting stack traces, taking into account the repeated frames between them. To complement the existing datasets collected from open-source projects, we share with the community SlowOps - a dataset of stack traces from IntelliJ-based products developed by JetBrains, which has an order of magnitude more stack traces per category. Finally, we carry out an evaluation that strives to be realistic: measuring not only the accuracy of categorization, but also the operation time and the ability to create new categories. The evaluation shows that our model strikes a good balance - it outperforms other models on both open-source datasets and SlowOps, while also being faster on time than most. We release all of our code and data, and hope that our work can pave the way to further practice-oriented research in the area.

The task of finding the best developer to fix a bug is called bug triage. Most of the existing approaches consider the bug triage task as a classification problem, however, classification is not appropriate when the sets of classes change over time (as developers often do in a project). Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, all the existing models use textual sources of information, i.e., bug descriptions, which are not always available. In this work, we explore the applicability of existing solutions for the bug triage problem when stack traces are used as the main data source of bug reports. Additionally, we reformulate this task as a ranking problem and propose new deep learning models to solve it. The models are based on a bidirectional recurrent neural network with attention and on a convolutional neural network, with the weights of the models optimized using a ranking loss function. To improve the quality of ranking, we propose using additional information from version control system annotations. Two approaches are proposed for extracting features from annotations: manual and using an additional neural network. To evaluate our models, we collected two datasets of real-world stack traces. Our experiments show that the proposed models outperform existing models adapted to handle stack traces. To facilitate further research in this area, we publish the source code of our models and one of the collected datasets.

Automatic crash reporting systems have become a de-facto standard in software development. These systems monitor target software, and if a crash occurs they send details to a backend application. Later on, these reports are aggregated and used in the development process to 1) understand whether it is a new or an existing issue, 2) assign these bugs to appropriate developers, and 3) gain a general overview of the application's bug landscape. The efficiency of report aggregation and subsequent operations heavily depends on the quality of the report similarity metric. However, a distinctive feature of this kind of report is that no textual input from the user (i.e., bug description) is available: it contains only stack trace information. In this paper, we present S3M ("extreme") - the first approach to computing stack trace similarity based on deep learning. It is based on a siamese architecture that uses a biLSTM encoder and a fully-connected classifier to compute similarity. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art on both open-sourced data and a private JetBrains dataset. Additionally, we review the impact of stack trace trimming on the quality of the results.

This paper presents a new method for constructing an optimal feature set from sequential data. It creates a dictionary of n-grams of variable length (we call them v-grams), based on the minimum description length principle. The proposed method is a dictionary coder and works simultaneously as both a compression algorithm and as unsupervised feature extraction. The length of constructed v-grams is not limited by any bound and exceeds 100 characters in provided experiments. Constructed v-grams can be used for any sequential data analysis and allows transfer bag-of-word techniques to non-text data types. The method demonstrates a high compression rate on various real-life datasets. Extracted features generate a practical basis for text classification, that shows competitive results on standard text classification collections without using the text structure. Combining extracted character v-grams with the words from the original text we achieved substantially better classification quality than on words or v-grams alone.