Can We Enhance Bug Report Quality Using LLMs?: An Empirical Study of LLM-Based Bug Report Generation
This addresses the issue of bug report quality for software developers, offering an incremental improvement through automation to reduce manual effort in software maintenance.
The paper tackled the problem of low-quality bug reports by using instruction fine-tuned LLMs to automatically transform unstructured reports into structured ones, finding that fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 achieved a CTQRS score of 77% and generalized well to unseen projects with up to 70% CTQRS.
Bug reports contain the information developers need to triage and fix software bugs. However, unclear, incomplete, or ambiguous information may lead to delays and excessive manual effort spent on bug triage and resolution. In this paper, we explore whether Instruction fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically transform casual, unstructured bug reports into high-quality, structured bug reports adhering to a standard template. We evaluate three open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (\emph{Qwen 2.5, Mistral, and Llama 3.2}) against ChatGPT-4o, measuring performance on established metrics such as CTQRS, ROUGE, METEOR, and SBERT. Our experiments show that fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 achieves a CTQRS score of \textbf{77%}, outperforming both fine-tuned Mistral (\textbf{71%}), Llama 3.2 (\textbf{63%}) and ChatGPT in 3-shot learning (\textbf{75%}). Further analysis reveals that Llama 3.2 shows higher accuracy of detecting missing fields particularly Expected Behavior and Actual Behavior, while Qwen 2.5 demonstrates superior performance in capturing Steps-to-Reproduce, with an F1 score of 76%. Additional testing of the models on other popular projects (e.g., Eclipse, GCC) demonstrates that our approach generalizes well, achieving up to \textbf{70%} CTQRS in unseen projects' bug reports. These findings highlight the potential of instruction fine-tuning in automating structured bug report generation, reducing manual effort for developers and streamlining the software maintenance process.