Automated Bug Report Prioritization in Large Open-Source Projects

Abstract: Large open-source projects receive a large number of issues (known as bugs), including software defect (i.e., bug) reports and new feature requests from their user and developer communities at a fast rate. The often limited project resources do not allow them to deal with all issues. Instead, they have to prioritize them according to the project's priorities and the issues' severities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automated bug prioritization based on the natural language text of the bug reports that are stored in the open bug repositories of the issue-tracking systems. We conduct topic modeling using a variant of LDA called TopicMiner-MTM and text classification with the BERT LLM to achieve a higher performance level compared to the state-of-the-art. Experimental results using an existing reference dataset containing 85,156 bug reports of the Eclipse Platform project indicate that we outperform existing approaches in terms of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-measure of the bug report priority prediction.