Interactive Visualization of Bug Reports Using Topic Evolution and Extractive Summaries

Software bug reports are important project artifacts that evolve throughout the life of a software project. Software bugs are issues that are reported by users when these issues hinder their work. Software projects evolve over time as bugs are addressed and new features are added. Managing bugs can be a significant challenge as a project manager generally needs to be aware of all the bug reports for the current version, and this can be even more challenging when the number of bug reports becomes large. It is preferable that a developer new to a project improves her knowledge with the project along with the bug reports during working on it, which is likely to help her avoid or handle the reported issues. In this paper, we propose a prototype that assists developers review a project´s bug reports by interactively visualizing insightful information regarding the bug reports using topic analysis. In addition, in order to reduce developers´ time and efforts when studying a bug report, the proposed prototype also provides an extractive summary visualization of each bug report. In this research, it is shown that our proposed prototype performs better in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure than a baseline approach that uses time-sensitive keyword extraction.