An Automatically Created Novel Bug Dataset and its Validation in Bug Prediction

Public BugHunter Dataset for Java.

Online appendix for the paper sent to the Journal of Systems and Software.

Authors:

Rudolf Ferenc, Péter Gyimesi, Gábor Gyimesi, Zoltán Tóth, Tibor Gyimóthy.

Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary
MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, Szeged, Hungary

Abstract:

Bugs are inescapable during software development due to frequent code changes, tight deadlines, etc., therefore, it is important to have tools to find these errors. One way of performing bug identification is to analyze the characteristics of buggy source code elements from the past and predict the present ones based on the same characteristics, using e.g. machine learning models. To support model building tasks, code elements and their characteristics are collected in so-called bug datasets which serve as the input for learning.

We present the BugHunter Dataset: a novel kind of automatically constructed and freely available bug dataset containing code elements (files, classes, methods) with a wide set of code metrics and bug information. Other available bug datasets follow the traditional approach of gathering the characteristics of all source code elements (buggy and non-buggy) at only one or more pre-selected release versions of the code. Our approach, on the other hand, captures the buggy and the fixed states of the same source code elements from the narrowest timeframe we can identify for a bug's presence, regardless of release versions. To show the usefulness of the new dataset, we built and evaluated bug prediction models and achieved F-measure values over 0.74.

Keywords:

bug dataset; bug prediction; static code analysis; code metrics; machine learning; GitHub

Online appendix:

Download link for the learning results.

Download link for the BugHunterDataset 1.0 (~300 MB).