基于信息检索的缺陷定位:问题、进展与挑战

缺陷的存在，会影响软件系统的正常使用甚至带来重大危害.为了帮助开发者尽快找到并修复这些缺陷，研究者提出了基于信息检索的缺陷定位方法.这类方法将缺陷定位视为一个检索任务，它为每个缺陷报告生成一份按照程序实体与缺陷相关度降序排序的列表.开发者可以根据列表顺序来审查代码，从而降低审查成本并加速缺陷定位的进程.近年来，该领域的研究工作十分活跃，在改良定位方法和完善评价体系方面取得了较大进展.与此同时，为了能够在实践中更好地应用这类方法，该领域的研究工作仍面临着一些亟待解决的挑战.对近年来国内外学者在该领域的研究成果进行系统性的总结：首先，描述了基于信息检索的缺陷定位方法的研究问题；然后，分别从模型改良和模型评估两方面陈述了相关的研究进展，并对具体的理论和技术途径进行梳理；接着，简要介绍了缺陷定位的其他相关技术；最后，总结了目前该领域研究过程中面临的挑战并给出建议的研究方向.

Information Retrieval Based Bug Localization: Research Problem, Progress, and Challenges

Bugs can affect the normal usage of a software system or even bring huge damages. In order to facilitate developer to find and fix bugs as soon as possible, information retrieval based bug localization techniques have been proposed. This kind of techniques regards bug localization as a task of text retrieval. Specifically, for a given bug report, a rank list of code entities in a descending order is provided according to relevance score between code entity and the bug. Developers can select entities in the rank from top to bottom, which helps reducing the review cost and accelerating the process of bug localization. In recent years, a great progress has been achieved in information retrieval based bug localization techniques. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to apply them in practice. This survey offers a systematic overview of recent research achievements in information retrieval based bug localization techniques. First, the research problem is introduced in information retrieval-based bug localization. Then, the current main research work is described in detail. After that, the related techniques are discussed. Finally, the opportunities and challenges are summarized in this field and the research directions in the future are outlined.