Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a sub-type of technical debt. It is introduced to represent such technical debts that are intentionally introduced by developers in the process of software development. While being able to gain short-term benefits, the introduction of SATDs often requires to be paid back later with a higher cost, e.g., introducing bugs to the software or increasing the complexity of the software. To cope with these issues, our community has proposed various machine learning-based approaches to detect SATDs. These approaches, however, are either not generic that usually require manual feature engineering efforts or do not provide promising means to explain the predicted outcomes. To that end, we propose to the community a novel approach, namely HATD, to detect and explain SATDs using attention-based neural networks. Through extensive experiments on 445,365 comments in 20 projects, we show that HATD is effective in detecting SATDs on both in-the-lab and in-the-wild datasets under both within-project and cross-project settings. HATD also outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in detecting and explaining SATDs.

Xin Wang

Wuhan University

Jin Liu

Wuhan University

Li Li

Monash University, Australia

Australia

Xiao Chen

Monash University

Xiao Liu

School of Information Technology, Deakin University

Australia

Hao Wu

Yunnan University

Code retrieval helps developers reuse the code snippet in the open-source projects. Given a natural language description, code retrieval aims to search for the most relevant code among a set of code. Existing state-of-the-art approaches apply neural networks to code retrieval. However, these approaches still fail to capture an important feature: overlaps. The overlaps between different names used by different people indicate that two different names may be potentially related (e.g., message'' andmsg''), and the overlaps between identifiers in code and words in natural language descriptions indicate that the code snippet and the description may potentially be related. To address these problems, we propose a novel neural architecture named OCoR, where we introduce two specifically-designed components to capture overlaps: the first embeds identifiers by character to capture the overlaps between identifiers, and the second introduces a novel overlap matrix to represent the degrees of overlaps between each natural language word and each identifier.

The evaluation was conducted on two established datasets. The experimental results show that OCoR significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches and achieves 13.1% to 22.3% improvements. Moreover, we also conducted several in-depth experiments to help understand the performance of different components in OCoR.

Qihao Zhu

Peking University

Zeyu Sun

Peking University

Xiran Liang

Peking University

Yingfei Xiong

Peking University, China

Lu Zhang

Peking University, China

Given a bug report of a project, the task of locating the faults of the bug report is called fault localization. To help programmers in the fault localization process, many approaches have been proposed, and have achieved promising results to locate faulty files. However, it is still challenging to locate faulty methods, because many methods are short and do not have sufficient details to determine whether they are faulty. In this paper, we present BugPecker, a novel approach to locate faulty methods based on its deep learning on revision graphs. Its key idea includes (1) building revision graphs and capturing the details of past fixes as much as possible, and (2) discovering relations inside our revision graphs to expand the details for methods and calculating various features to assist our ranking. We have implemented BugPecker, and evaluated it on three open source projects. The early results show that BugPecker achieves a mean average precision (MAP) of 0.263 and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.291, which improve the prior approaches significantly. For example, BugPecker improves the MAP values of all three projects by five times, compared with two recent approaches such as DNNLoc-m and BLIA 1.5.

Junming Cao

School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shouliang Yang

School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Wenhui Jiang

School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Hushuang Zeng

School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Beijun Shen

School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Hao Zhong

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

China