Crowdsourced bug triaging

Bug triaging and assignment is a time-consuming task in big projects. Most research in this area examines the developers' prior development and bug-fixing activities in order to recognize their areas of expertise and assign to them relevant bug fixes. We propose a novel method that exploits a new source of evidence for the developers' expertise, namely their contributions to Q&A platforms such as Stack Overflow. We evaluated this method in the context of the 20 largest GitHub projects, considering 7144 bug reports. Our results demonstrate that our method exhibits superior accuracy to other state-of-the-art methods, and that future bug-assignment algorithms should consider exploring other sources of expertise, beyond the project's version-control system and bug tracker.