Bug fixing is expensive, which attracts developers and researchers to study how to effectively resolve bugs. Therefore, it has become a hot research topic in software engineering. During the bug fixing process, developers leverage various software artifacts (e.g., bug reports, commits, log files, and source files) and explore multisource heterogeneous information (Q&A websites, web resources, and software communities) to reproduce bugs, localize bugs, identify candidate fixing solutions, apply fixes and validate fixes. The rich data provides important information of bug fixing, which can guide developers to resolve bugs. For example, a bug report not only shows the details of the reported bug, but also shows the potential method of bug fixing. Therefore, how to analyze and utilize such data is an important step for bug fixing.
The special issue will focus on the new generation of bug fixing. Generally, bug fixing process includes bug understanding (i.e., bug reproduction, severity/priority verification, bug summarization, bug classification, and bug knowledge extraction), bug localization, bug fixing, and bug validation. By using data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence technologies, visualization technologies, human-computer interaction technologies and code analysis technologies, a series of new automated algorithms can be proposed to improve the performance of bug fixing.
We invite submissions of high-quality papers describing original and significant work in all areas of the new generation of bug fixing including (but not limited to): 1) providing a summary of research that advances intelligent bug fixing using multiple data analysis and processing techniques, and 2) serving as a comprehensive collection of some of the current state-of-the-art technologies within this content. We especially encourage the authors of the best papers accepted by the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Bug Fixing 2020 to submit their extended articles. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Big Data in Bug Fixing Activities
Bug Knowledge and Bug Understanding
Software Artifacts Generation in Bug Fixing Process
Bug Report Summarization/Enrichment for Fixing Bugs