Retrieval from software libraries for bug localization

This retrospective on our 2011 MSR publication starts with the research milieu that led to the work reported in our paper. We brie y review the competing ideas of a decade ago that could be applied to solving the problem of identifying the les in a software library related to a query. We were especially interested in nding out if the more complex text retrieval methods of that time would be e ective in the software context. A surprising conclusion of our paper was that the reality was exactly the opposite: the more traditional simpler methods outperformed the complex methods. In addition to this surprising result, our paper was also the rst to report what was considered at that time a large-scale quantitative evaluation of the IR-based approaches to automatic bug localization. Over the years, such quantitative evaluations have become the norm. We believe that these contributions were largely responsible for the popularity of this paper in the research literature.