On Usefulness of the Deep-Learning-Based Bug Localization Models to Practitioners

Abstract

Background: Developers spend a significant amount of time and effort to localize bugs. In the literature, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art bug localization models to help developers localize bugs easily. The practitioners, on the other hand, expect a bug localization tool to meet certain criteria, such as trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency. The current models are not capable of meeting these criteria, making it harder to adopt these models in practice. Recently, deep-learning-based bug localization models have been proposed in the literature. They show a better performance than the state-of-the-art models. Aim: In this research, we would like to investigate whether deep learning models meet the expectations of practitioners or not. Method: We constructed a Convolution Neural Network and a Simple Logistic model to examine their effectiveness in localizing bugs. We train these models on five open source projects written in Java and compare their performance with the performance of other state-of-the-art models trained on these datasets. Results: Our experiments show that although the deep learning models perform better than classic machine learning models, they meet the adoption criteria set by the practitioners only partially. Conclusions: This work provides evidence that the practitioners should be cautious while using the current state of the art models for production-level use-cases. It also highlights the need for standardization of performance benchmarks to ensure that bug localization models are assessed equitably and realistically.