Abstract
Users of software applications use Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) to file
enhancement reports, which leads to a large quantity of user requests.
Indeed, these reports have become an important source for software
requirements because they help to continuously improve software
applications. Usually, developers and maintainers evaluate them and
decide which user reports can be accepted. However, enhancement reports
are continuously being raised one after another, which makes this
process time-consuming and labor-intensive. Timely handling and
implementation of these enhancement reports can effectively improve user
satisfaction and product competitiveness. Thus, research has focused on
automated methods for predicting which enhancement reports are likely to
be approved, to maximum the value derived from user reports. However,
reported results of existing approaches are typically not good enough
for practical use. In this paper, we propose a novel
creator-profile-based method to explore dependencies among enhancements
to improve the prediction performance. Firstly, we define the concept of
a creator profile, including a general method of how to generate creator
profiles from the data set. Then we explain how to employ creator
profiles to the problem of enhancement report approval prediction.
Finally, we evaluate our approach on 40,551 enhancement reports
collected from ITSs. The experimental results indicate that our proposed
approach greatly improve on existing state of the art, especially in
predicting approved reports. For cross-application prediction, the
accuracy is 80.7%, while for non-cross-application prediction, the
overall accuracy is 83.6%. That is, with the proposed approach, over
80% of user requests can be automatically identified for exacting
valuable user requirements, which significantly reduces labor costs.
Replication package is available at:
https://anonymous.4open.science/r/approval_prediction-507E