DevSched: an efficient bug-triaging model for allocating and balancing developer tasks

Bug triage is a critical aspect of software development that involves classifying and prioritizing reported bugs. Effective bug triage ensures that resources are allocated and bug patterns are efficiently identified to address underlying issues. However, inappropriate bug distributions among different types of developers cause delays, errors, incapability, and lower job satisfaction. Many works were proposed to recommend developers for fixing bugs. However, previous works did not consider the proper workload distributions among developers. The objective of the work is to introduce a task allocation and load-balancing model called Developer Scheduler (DevSched) that properly distributes unassigned bugs among different types of developers more efficiently. DevSched creates multiple developer profiles from existing bug reports. Different new bug reports are converted bug into vectors, and developer profiles are transformed into a corpus of words. Then, different bugs are assigned into developers by comparing the highest cosine similarity between vectors of bugs and developers’ corpus. DevSched dynamically updates the developer’s workload, and their ratings are adjusted based on the performance. In this work, Eclipse, Mozilla, and NetBeans bug reports are utilized to investigate individual developers’ performance in bug-triaging process. DevSched assigns and balances bugs among different kinds of developers more efficiently. After applying the proposed load-balancing model, the standard deviations are rapidly decreased than normal bug distributions for different datasets. This process is repeated for each bug to ensure the efficient allocation of resources and the resolution of critical issues. Therefore, the lowest standard deviation is found to be 0.48 for the Eclipse dataset. By assigning bugs based on defined thresholds, skills, and workloads, DevSched improves its efficiency, reduces delays, and enhances job satisfaction among developers.