Academic Research: Recommending similar bugs

Hello,

I am a PhD student at UFMG, Brazil. As part of my research, I am working
with a recommender for similar bugs.

The idea is to recommend to a developer who has fixed or is working on a
bug X that there are similar bugs X1, X2, etc in the tracking system.
Currently, I am assuming that two bugs are similar if they are assigned to
the same component and share some similarities among their textual
descriptions.

In fact, we implemented a prototype extension of Bugzilla, with recommendations
of similar bugs, called NextBug. We also have some results showing that
similar bugs happen in real systems. Finally, we conducted a small survey
with Mozilla developers, who also provided an interesting feedback.

Therefore, if possible, I would like to discuss with Bugzilla's developers
if they seem such recommendations useful and if they have interest on
including a similar feature in the system.

I appreciate any comments on the matter.

Thank you in advance for your collaboration.

- Henrique Rocha
Computer Science PhD Student
Applied Software Engineering Research Group  (
http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/)