Changes, Evolution and Bugs - Recommendation Systems for Issue Management

Changes in evolving software systems are often managed using an issue repository. This repository may contribute to information overload in an organization, but it may also help navigating the software system. Software developers spend much effort on issue triage, a task in which the mere number of issue reports becomes a significant challenge. One specific difficulty is to determine whether a newly submitted issue report is a duplicate of an issue previously reported, if it contains complementary information related to a known issue, or if the issue report addresses something that has not been observed before. However, the large number of issue reports may also be used to help a developer to navigate the software development project to find related software artifacts, required both to understand the issue itself, and to analyze the impact of a possible issue resolution. This chapter presents recommendation systems that use information in issue repositories to support these two challenges, by supporting either duplicate detection of issue reports or navigation of artifacts in evolving software systems.