Assisted Detection of Duplicate Bug Reports

Duplicate bug reports, reports which describe problems or enhancements for which there is already a report in a bug repository, consume time of bug triagers and software developers that might better be spent working on reports that describe unique requests. For many open source projects, the number of duplicate reports represents a significant percentage of the repository, numbering in the thousands of reports for many projects. In this thesis, we introduce an approach to suggest potential duplicate bug reports to a bug triager who is processing a new report. We tested our approach on four popular open source projects, achieving the best precision and recall rates of 29% and 50% respectively on reports from the popular Firefox open source project. We report on a user study in which we investigated whether our approach can help novice bug triagers process reports from the Firefox repository. Despite the relatively low precision and recall rates of our approach, we found that its use does increase the duplicate detection accuracy of novice bug triagers, while significantly reducing the number of searches they perform and slightly reducing the time they spend on each report.