Bug Report Summarization: A systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Natural language Processing techniques have been proved very helpful in optimizing the software development process. It has improved the accuracy and speed of different steps of development process. Summarization of software artifacts is one of application of natural language processing techniques to help the developers or testers. Summarization tools and techniques have been applied to many software artifacts in the past like source code, discussions and bug reports. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the natural language processing techniques applied for the summarization of bug reports. Bug reports are very important for development process because these have valuable knowledge of the problems and their resolution. By summarizing bug reports, a lot of developer's time can be saved during bug triaging when developers are looking for the similar problems from the past. Bug report summarization is done by various methods and techniques and it have helped the developer to save their time and better understanding of the problem at hand. This survey of the past techniques used for the summarization of bug reports will provide useful and wide background knowledge of this research field to the future researchers.