Paper Info
Title
BOAT: an experimental platform for researchers to comparatively and reproducibly evaluate bug localization techniques
Abstract
Bug localization refers to the process of identifying source code files that contain defects from descriptions of these defects which are typically contained in bug reports. There have been many bug localization techniques proposed in the literature. However, often it is hard to compare these techniques since different evaluation datasets are used. At times the datasets are not made publicly available and thus it is difficult to reproduce reported results. Furthermore, some techniques are only evaluated on small datasets and thus it is not clear whether the results are generalizable. Thus, there is a need for a platform that allows various techniques to be compared with one another on a common pool containing a large number of bug reports with known defective source code files. In this paper, we address this need by proposing our Bug lOcalization experimental plATform (BOAT). BOAT is an extensible web application that contains thousands of bug reports with known defective source code files. Researchers can create accounts in BOAT, upload executables of their bug localization techniques, and see how these techniques perform in comparison with techniques uploaded by other researchers, with respect to some standard evaluation measures. BOAT is already preloaded with several bug localization techniques and thus researchers can directly compare their newly proposed techniques against these existing techniques. BOAT has been made available online since October 2013, and researchers could access the platform at: http://www.vlis.zju.edu.cn/blp.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2591062.2591066
international conference on software engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
experimentation,boat,experimental platform,bug localization,testing and debugging,benchmark
World Wide Web,Computer science,Source code,Upload,Real-time computing,Web application,Database,Executable
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
8
Authors
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
xinyu159030.19
David Lo25346259.67
Xin Xia397265.97
Xingen Wang4533.18
Pavneet Singh Kochhar530914.88
Yuan Tian649318.90
Xiaohu Yang7563.74
Shanping Li846646.11
jianling935529.86
Bo Zhou1024112.42