An Approach to Classify Software Maintenance Requests

  • Authors:
  • G. di Lucca

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '02 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'02)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

When a software system critical for an organization exhibitsa problem during its operation, it is relevant to fix it ina short period of time, to avoid serious economical losses.The problem is therefore noticed to the organization havingin charge the maintenance, and it should be correctly andquickly dispatched to the right maintenance team.We propose to automatically classify incoming maintenancerequests (also said tickets), routing them to specializedmaintenance teams. The final goal is to develop arouter, working around the clock, that, without human intervention,dispatches incoming tickets with the lowest misclassificationerror, measured with respect to a given routingpolicy.6000 maintenance tickets from a large, multi-site, softwaresystem, spanning about two years of system in-fieldoperation, were used to compare and assess the accuracyof different classification approaches (i.e., Vector Spacemodel, Bayesian model, support vectors, classification treesand k-nearest neighbor classification). The application andthe tickets were divided into eight areas and pre-classifiedby human experts. Preliminary results were encouraging,up to 84% of the incoming tickets were correctly classified.