A Market-Based Bug Allocation Mechanism Using Predictive Bug Lifetimes

Bug assignment in large software projects is typically a time-consuming and tedious task, effective assignment requires that bug triagers hold significant contextual information about both the reported bugs and the pool of available developers. In this paper, we propose an auction-based multiagent mechanism for assigning bugs to developers that is intended to minimize backlogs and overall bug lifetime. In this approach, developers and triagers are both modeled as intelligent software agents working on behalf of individuals in a multiagent environment. Upon receiving a bug report, triager agents auction off the bug and collect the requests. Developer agents compute their bids as a function of the developer's profile, preferences, current schedule of assigned bugs, and estimated time-to-fix of the bug. This value is then sent to the triager agent for the final decision. We use the Eclipse and Firefox bug repositories to validate our approach, our studies suggest that the proposed auction-based multiagent mechanism can improve the bug assignment process compared to currently practised methods. In particular, we found a 16% improvement in the number of fixed bugs compared to the historic data, based on a sample size of 213,000 bug reports over a period of 6 years.