Scaffle: bug localization on millions of files

Despite all efforts to avoid bugs, software sometimes crashes in the field, leaving crash traces as the only information to localize the problem. Prior approaches on localizing where to fix the root cause of a crash do not scale well to ultra-large scale, heterogeneous code bases that contain millions of code files written in multiple programming languages. This paper presents Scaffle, the first scalable bug localization technique, which is based on the key insight to divide the problem into two easier sub-problems. First, a trained machine learning model predicts which lines of a raw crash trace are most informative for localizing the bug. Then, these lines are fed to an information retrieval-based search engine to retrieve file paths in the code base, predicting which file to change to address the crash. The approach does not make any assumptions about the format of a crash trace or the language that produces it. We evaluate Scaffle with tens of thousands of crash traces produced by a large-scale industrial code base at Facebook that contains millions of possible bug locations and that powers tools used by billions of people. The results show that the approach correctly predicts the file to fix for 40% to 60% (50% to 70%) of all crash traces within the top-1 (top-5) predictions. Moreover, Scaffle improves over several baseline approaches, including an existing classification-based approach, a scalable variant of existing information retrieval-based approaches, and a set of hand-tuned, industrially deployed heuristics.