EXPSOL: Recommending Online Threads for Exception-Related Bug Reports

An exception-related bug is a kind of program bug which causes exceptions. During software maintenance, when programmers repair exception-related bugs, they typically analyze thrown exceptions to understand the root causes of such bugs. When encountering unfamiliar thrown exceptions, programmers often refer to online forum threads (e.g. StackOverflow) to understand how to fix them. Although some general search engines are available and some research tools are proposed, they are insufficient to recommend threads for exception-related bugs from large-scale online resources. In this paper, we propose an approach, named EXPSOL, which recommends online threads as solutions for a newly reported exception-related bug with a model trained by support vector machines. We conduct two evaluations on thousands of threads from StackOverflow and fixed issues from GitHub. The results of our first evaluation show the significance of our internal features and highlight the importance of integrating different features. The results of our second evaluation show that, EXPSOL performs better in mean average precision, mean reciprocal rank and recall than those of the Google search engine, the internal search engine of StackOverflow, and other existing approaches.