Improving Bug Assignment with Bug Tossing Graphs and Bug Similarities

In open-source software development the bug report is usually assigned to a developer for bug fixing. A large number of bug reports are tossed (reassigned) to other developers, for example because the bugs have been assigned by mistake. The tossing events increase bug-fix time. In order to quickly identify the fixer to bug reports we present an approach based on the bug tossing history and textual similarities between bug reports. This proposed approach is evaluated on Eclipse and Mozilla. The results show that our approach can significantly improve the efficiency of bug assignment: the bug resolver is often identified with fewer tossing events.