Automatic Summarization of Bug Reports

Software developers access bug reports in a project’s bug repository to help with a number of different tasks, including understanding how previous changes have been made and understanding multiple aspects of particular defects. A developer’s interaction with existing bug reports often requires perusing a substantial amount of text. In this article, we investigate whether it is possible to summarize bug reports automatically so that developers can perform their tasks by consulting shorter summaries instead of entire bug reports. We investigated whether existing conversation-based automated summarizers are applicable to bug reports and found that the quality of generated. We also trained a summarizer on a bug report corpus. This summarizer produces summaries that are statistically better than summaries produced by existing conversation-based generators.