Analyzing bug fix for automatic bug cause classification

During the bug fixing process, developers usually need to analyze the source code to induce the bug cause, which is useful for bug understanding and localization. The bug fixes of historical bugs usually reflects the bug causes when fixing them. This paper aims at exploiting the corresponding relationship between bug causes and bug fixes to automatically classify bugs into their cause categories. First, we define the code-related bug classification criterion from the perspective of the cause of bugs. Then, we propose a new model to exploit the knowledge in the bug fix by constructing fix trees from the diff source code at Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) level, and representing each fix tree based on the encoding method of Tree-based Convolutional Neural Network (TBCNN). Finally, the corresponding relationship between bug causes and bug fixes is analyzed by automatically classifying bugs into their cause categories. We collected 2000 real-world bugs from two open source projects Mozilla and Radare2 to evaluate our approach. The experimental results show the existence of observational correlation between the bug fix and the cause of the historical bugs, and the proposed fix tree can effectively express the characteristics of the historical bugs for bug cause classification.