Agnieszka Ciborowska

Agnieszka Ciborowska, Kostadin Damevski

Automatically localizing software bugs to the changesets that induced them has the potential to improve software developer efficiency and to positively affect software quality. To facilitate this automation, a bug report has to be effectively matched with source code changes, even when a significant lexical gap exists between natural language used to describe the bug and identifier naming practices used by developers. To bridge this gap, we need techniques that are able to capture software engineering-specific and project-specific semantics in order to detect relatedness between the two types of documents that goes beyond exact term matching. Popular transformer-based deep learning architectures, such as BERT, excel at leveraging contextual information, hence appear to be a suitable candidate for the task. However, BERT-like models are computationally expensive, which precludes them from being used in an environment where response time is important. In this paper, we describe how BERT can be made fast enough to be applicable to changeset-based bug localization. We also explore several design decisions in using BERT for this purpose, including how best to encode changesets and how to match bug reports to individual changes for improved accuracy. We compare the accuracy and performance of our model to a non-contextual baseline (i.e., vector space model) and BERT-based architectures previously used in software engineering. Our evaluation results demonstrate advantages in using the proposed BERT model compared to the baselines, especially for bug reports that lack any hints about related code elements.

Agnieszka Ciborowska, Aleksandar Chakarov, Rahul Pandita

Mainframe systems are facing a critical shortage of developer workforce as the current generation of COBOL developers retires. Furthermore, due to the limited availability of public COBOL resources, entry-level developers, who assume the mantle of legacy COBOL systems maintainers, face significant difficulties during routine maintenance tasks, such as code comprehension and defect location. While we made substantial advances in the field of software maintenance for modern programming languages yearly, mainframe maintenance has received limited attention. With this study, we aim to direct the attention of researchers and practitioners towards investigating and addressing challenges associated with mainframe development. Specifically, we explore the scope of defects affecting COBOL systems and defect location strategies commonly followed by COBOL developers and compare them with the modern programming language counterparts. To this end, we surveyed 30 COBOL and 74 modern Programming Language (PL) developers to understand the differences in defects and defect location strategies employed by the two groups. Our preliminary results show that: (1) major defect categories affecting the COBOL ecosystem are different than defects encountered in modern PL software projects; (2) the most challenging defect types in COBOL are also the ones that occur most frequently; and (3) COBOL and modern PL developers follow similar strategies to locate defective code.