The forgotten role of search queries in IR-based bug localization: an empirical study

Being light-weight and cost-effective, IR-based approaches for bug localization have shown promise in finding software bugs. However, the accuracy of these approaches heavily depends on their used bug reports. A significant number of bug reports contain only plain natural language texts. According to existing studies, IR-based approaches cannot perform well when they use these bug reports as search queries. On the other hand, there is a piece of recent evidence that suggests that even these natural language-only reports contain enough good keywords that could help localize the bugs successfully. On one hand, these findings suggest that natural language-only bug reports might be a sufficient source for good query keywords. On the other hand, they cast serious doubt on the query selection practices in the IR-based bug localization. In this article, we attempted to clear the sky on this aspect by conducting an in-depth empirical study that critically examines the state-of-the-art query selection practices in IR-based bug localization. In particular, we use a dataset of 2,320 bug reports, employ ten existing approaches from the literature, exploit the Genetic Algorithm-based approach to construct optimal, near-optimal search queries from these bug reports, and then answer three research questions. We confirmed that the state-of-the-art query construction approaches are indeed not sufficient for constructing appropriate queries (for bug localization) from certain natural language-only bug reports. However, these bug reports indeed contain high-quality search keywords in their texts even though they might not contain explicit hints for localizing bugs (e.g., stack traces). We also demonstrate that optimal queries and non-optimal queries chosen from bug report texts are significantly different in terms of several keyword characteristics (e.g., frequency, entropy, position, part of speech). Such an analysis has led us to four actionable insights on how to choose appropriate keywords from a bug report. Furthermore, we demonstrate 27%–34% improvement in the performance of non-optimal queries through the application of our actionable insights to them. Finally, we summarize our study findings with future research directions (e.g., machine intelligence in keyword selection).