Active semi-supervised defect categorization

Abstract—Defects are inseparable part of software develop-ment and evolution. To better comprehend problems affecting a software system, developers often store historical defects and these defects can be categorized into families. IBM proposes Orthogonal Defect Categorization (ODC) which include various classifications of defects based on a number of orthogonal dimensions (e.g., symptoms and semantics of defects, root causes of defects, etc.). To help developers categorize defects, several approaches that employ machine learning have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, these approaches often require developers to manually label a large number of defect examples. In practice, manually labelling a large number of examples is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Thus, reducing the onerous burden of manual labelling while still being able to achieve good performance is crucial towards the adoption of