Incorporating Multiple Features to Predict Bug Fixing Time with Neural Networks

Debugging is a well-known time-consuming task, and knowing how long it would take to resolve bugs is of great importance for allocating the limited resources in a software development team. However, it is challenging to predict bug fixing time since fixing bugs is subject to a plethora of uncertain factors such as types of bugs, program complexity and developers' abilities. Existing work mainly focuses on developers' activities in a bug lifecycle and ignores other important factors. In light of the limitations of existing work, we propose a novel approach to predicting the bug fixing time by incorporating a comprehensive set of relevant features. Specifically, we consider four types of features including developers' activities, developers' sentiments, semantics of bugs, and efforts caused by understanding and analyzing source code, and design particular neural networks to take advantage of these features and make them work efficiently. Experimental results on four real application datasets demonstrate that on the one hand, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by over 5% in accuracy and 7.3% in F1-score on average; on the other hand, each type of the features considered in our approach plays an important part in the prediction.