Issue resolution and bug-fixing processes are essential in the development of machine-learning libraries, similar to software development, to ensure well-optimized functions. Understanding the issue resolution and bug-fixing process of machine-learning libraries can help developers identify areas for improvement and optimize their strategies for issue resolution and bug-fixing. However, detailed studies on this topic are lacking. Therefore, we investigated the effectiveness of issue resolution for bug-fixing processes in six machine-learning libraries: Tensorflow, Keras, Theano, Pytorch, Caffe, and Scikit-learn. We addressed seven research questions (RQs) using 16,921 issues extracted from the GitHub repository via the GitHub Rest API. We employed several quantitative methods of data analysis, including correlation, OLS regression, percentage and frequency count, and heatmap to analyze the RQs. We found the following through our empirical investigation: (1) The most common categories of issues that arise in machine-learning libraries are bugs, documentation, optimization, crashes, enhancement, new feature requests, build/CI, support, and performance. (2) Effective strategies for addressing these problems include fixing critical bugs, optimizing performance, and improving documentation. (3) These categorized issues are related to testing and runtime and are common among all six machine-learning libraries. (4) Monitoring the total number of comments on issues can provide insights into the duration of the issues. (5) It is crucial to strike a balance between prioritizing critical issues and addressing other issues in a timely manner. Therefore, this study concludes that efficient issue-tracking processes, effective communication, and collaboration are vital for effective resolution of issues and bug fixing processes in machine-learning libraries.
High-quality and large-scale repositories of real bugs and their concise patches collected from real-world applications are critical for research in software engineering community. In such a repository, each real bug is explicitly associated with its fix. Therefore, on one side, the real bugs and their fixes} may inspire novel approaches for finding, locating, and repairing software bugs; on the other side, the real bugs and their fixes are indispensable for rigorous and meaningful evaluation of approaches for software testing, fault localization, and program repair. To this end, a number of s…
Many automated program repair techniques have been proposed for fixing bugs. Some of these techniques use the information beyond the given buggy program and test suite to improve the quality of generated patches. However, there are several limitations that hinder the wide adoption of these techniques, including (1) they rely on a fixed set of repair templates for patch generation or reference implementation, (2) searching for the suitable reference implementation is challenging, (3) generated patches are not explainable. Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across differe…
In practice, developers search for related earlier bugs and their associated discussion threads when faced with a new bug to repair. Typically, these discussion threads consist of comments and even bug-fixing comments intended to capture clues for facilitating the investigation and root cause of a new bug report. Over time, these discussions can become extensively lengthy and difficult to understand. Inevitably, these discussion threads lead to instances where bug-fixing comments intermingle with seemingly-unrelated comments. This task, however, poses further challenges when dealing with high …
When developers investigate a new bug report, they search for similar previously fixed bug reports and discussion threads attached to them. These discussion threads convey important information about the behavior of the bug including relevant bug-fixing comments. Oftentimes, these discussion threads become extensively lengthy due to the severity of the reported bug. This adds another layer of complexity, especially if relevant bug-fixing comments intermingle with seemingly unrelated comments. To manually detect these relevant comments among various cross-cutting discussion threads can become a…
To support software developers in finding and fixing software bugs, several automated program repair techniques have been introduced. Given a test suite, standard methods usually either synthesize a repair, or navigate a search space of software edits to find test-suite passing variants. Recent program repair methods are based on deep learning approaches. One of these novel methods, which is not primarily intended for automated program repair, but is still suitable for it, is ChatGPT. The bug fixing performance of ChatGPT, however, is so far unclear. Therefore, in this paper we evaluate ChatGP…
Many research areas in software engineering, such as mutation testing, automatic repair, fault localization, and fault injection, rely on empirical knowledge about recurring bug-fixing code changes. Previous studies in this field focus on what has been changed due to bug-fixes, such as in terms of code edit actions. However, such studies did not consider where the bug-fix change was made (i.e., the context of the change), but knowing about the context can potentially narrow the search space for many software engineering techniques (e.g., by focusing mutation only on specific parts of the softw…
Automatically fixing software bugs is a challenging task. While recent work showed that natural language context is useful in guiding bug-fixing models, the approach required prompting developers to provide this context, which was simulated through commit messages written after the bug-fixing code changes were made. We instead propose using bug report discussions, which are available before the task is performed and are also naturally occurring, avoiding the need for any additional information from developers. For this, we augment standard bug-fixing datasets with bug report discussions. Using…
Millions of open-source projects with numerous bug fixes are available in code repositories. This proliferation of software development histories can be leveraged to learn how to fix common programming bugs. To explore such a potential, we perform an empirical study to assess the feasibility of using Neural Machine Translation techniques for learning bug-fixing patches for real defects. First, we mine millions of bug-fixes from the change histories of projects hosted on GitHub, in order to extract meaningful examples of such bug-fixes. Next, we abstract the buggy and corresponding fixed code, …
Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs, reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We inv…
Software is prone to bugs and failures. Security bugs are those that expose or share privileged information and access in violation of the software's requirements. Given the seriousness of security bugs, there are centralized mechanisms for supporting and tracking these bugs across multiple products, one such mechanism is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID description. When a bug gets a CVE, it is referenced by its CVE ID. Thus we explore thousands of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, on Github, to determine if developers reference or discuss CVEs in their code, …
Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three…
Timeout bugs can cause serious availability and performance issues which are often difficult to fix due to the lack of diagnostic information. Previous work proposed solutions for fixing specific type of timeout-related performance bugs. In this paper, we present TFix+, a self-configuring timeout bug fixing framework for automatically correcting two major kinds of timeout bugs (i.e., misused timeout bugs and missing timeout bugs) with dynamic timeout value predictions. TFix+ provides two new hybrid schemes for fixing misused and missing timeout bugs, respectively. TFix+ further provides predic…
Smartphones and tablets have established themselves as mainstays in the modern computing landscape. It is conceivable that in the near future such devices may supplant laptops and desktops, becoming many users primary means of carrying out typical computer assisted tasks. In turn, this means that mobile applications will continue on a trajectory to becoming more complex, and the primary focus of millions of developers worldwide. In order to properly create and maintain these apps developers will need support, especially with regard to the prompt confirmation and resolution of bug reports. Unfo…
Fix pattern-based patch generation is a promising direction in Automated Program Repair (APR). Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of pattern-based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined from fix changes in development histories. Unfortunately, collecting a reliable set of bug fixes in repositories can be challenging. In this paper, we propose to investigate the possibility in an APR scenario of leveraging code changes that address viol…
Bug triage can be defined as the process of assigning a developer to a bug report. The duty of the bug triage team is to study the developers profiles well in order to make an appropriate match between the developers and the incoming bug reports. Thus, this process is a vital step in issue management system. In fact, the number of bug reports submitted every day is gradually increasing which affects the developer workload. Thus, the triage team should consider this factor in distributing the bugs and because of the manual approach, many developers are burden. In particular, triaging bug report…
Static analyzers help find bugs early by warning about recurring bug categories. While fixing these bugs still remains a mostly manual task in practice, we observe that fixes for a specific bug category often are repetitive. This paper addresses the problem of automatically fixing instances of common bugs by learning from past fixes. We present Getafix, an approach that produces human-like fixes while being fast enough to suggest fixes in time proportional to the amount of time needed to obtain static analysis results in the first place. Getafix is based on a novel hierarchical clustering algo…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Open-Source Projects and Libraries are being used in software development while also bearing multiple security vulnerabilities. This use of third party ecosystem creates a new kind of attack surface for a product in development. An intelligent attacker can attack a product by exploiting one of the vulnerabilities present in linked projects and libraries. In this paper, we mine threat intelligence about open source projects and libraries from bugs and issues reported on public code repositories. We also track library and project dependencies for installed software on a client machine. We repres…
Software bugs are common and correcting them accounts for a significant part of costs in the software development and maintenance process. This calls for automatic techniques to deal with them. One promising direction towards this goal is gaining repair knowledge from historical bug fixing examples. Retrieving insights from software development history is particularly appealing with the constant progress of machine learning paradigms and skyrocketing `big' bug fixing data generated through Continuous Integration (CI). In this paper, we present R-Hero, a novel software repair bot that applies c…
Fixing bugs in a timely manner lowers various potential costs in software maintenance. However, manual bug fixing scheduling can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose the Schedule and Dependency-aware Bug Triage (S-DABT), a bug triaging method that utilizes integer programming and machine learning techniques to assign bugs to suitable developers. Unlike prior works that largely focus on a single component of the bug reports, our approach takes into account the textual data, bug fixing costs, and bug dependencies. We further incorporate the schedule of develo…
Deep learning has gained substantial popularity in recent years. Developers mainly rely on libraries and tools to add deep learning capabilities to their software. What kinds of bugs are frequently found in such software? What are the root causes of such bugs? What impacts do such bugs have? Which stages of deep learning pipeline are more bug prone? Are there any antipatterns? Understanding such characteristics of bugs in deep learning software has the potential to foster the development of better deep learning platforms, debugging mechanisms, development practices, and encourage the developme…
We present PTracer, a Linux kernel patch trace bot based on an improved PatchNet. PTracer continuously monitors new patches in the git repository of the mainline Linux kernel, filters out unconcerned ones, classifies the rest as bug-fixing or non bug-fixing patches, and reports bug-fixing patches to the kernel experts of commercial operating systems. We use the patches in February 2019 of the mainline Linux kernel to perform the test. As a result, PTracer recommended 151 patches to CGEL kernel experts out of 5,142, and 102 of which were accepted. PTracer has been successfully applied to a comm…
Many studies have shown the benefits of introducing open-source projects into teaching Software Engineering (SE) courses. However, there are several limitations of existing studies that limit the wide adaptation of open-source projects in a classroom setting, including (1) the selected project is limited to one particular project, (2) most studies only investigated on its effect on teaching a specific SE concept, and (3) students may make mistakes in their contribution which leads to poor quality code. Meanwhile, software companies have successfully launched programs like Google Summer of Code…
Labelling Bug-Fixing Commits with Local Open-Weight Language Models
Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学计算机学院）；SBA Research gGmbH（SBA研究所）；Christian Doppler Laboratory AsTra, University of Vienna（维也纳大学AsTra克里斯蒂安·多普勒实验室）
In software engineering practice, fixing a bug promptly reduces the associated costs. On the other hand, the manual bug fixing process can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. In this work, we introduce a bug triaging method, called Dependency-aware Bug Triaging (DABT), which leverages natural language processing and integer programming to assign bugs to appropriate developers. Unlike previous works that mainly focus on one aspect of the bug reports, DABT considers the textual information, cost associated with each bug, and dependency among them. Therefore, this comprehensive formul…
An Empirical Study on Bugs Inside PyTorch: A Replication Study
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）；Queen’s University（女王大学）
