An Automated Approach for Scheduling Bug Fix Tasks

Even if a development team uses the best Software Engineering practices to produce high-quality software, end users may find defects that were not previously identified during the software development life-cycle. These defects must be fixed and new versions of the software incorporating the patches that solve them must be released. The project manager must schedule a set of error correction tasks with different priorities in order to minimize the time required to accomplish these tasks and guarantee that the more important issues have been fixed. Given the large number of distinct schedules, an automatically tool to find good schedules may be helpful to project managers. This work proposes a method which captures relevant information from bug repositories and submits them to a genetic algorithm to find near optimal bug correction task schedules. We have evaluated the approach using a subset of the Eclipse bug repository and it suggested better schedules than the actual schedules followed by Eclipse developers.