Software development teams generally welcome any effort to expose bugs in
their code base. In this work, we build on the hypothesis that mobile apps from
the same category (e.g., two web browser apps) may be affected by similar bugs
in their evolution process. It is therefore possible to transfer the experience
of one historical app to quickly find bugs in its new counterparts. This has
been referred to as collaborative bug finding in the literature. Our novelty is
that we guide the bug finding process by considering that existing bugs have
been hinted within app reviews. Concretely, we design the BugRMSys approach to
recommend bug reports for a target app by matching historical bug reports from
apps in the same category with user app reviews of the target app. We
experimentally show that this approach enables us to quickly expose and report
dozens of bugs for targeted apps such as Brave (web browser app). BugRMSys's
implementation relies on DistilBERT to produce natural language text
embeddings. Our pipeline considers similarities between bug reports and app
reviews to identify relevant bugs. We then focus on the app review as well as
potential reproduction steps in the historical bug report (from a same-category
app) to reproduce the bugs.
Overall, after applying BugRMSys to six popular apps, we were able to
identify, reproduce and report 20 new bugs: among these, 9 reports have been
already triaged, 6 were confirmed, and 4 have been fixed by official
development teams, respectively