Abstract:When a software bug report is assigned to a developer for bug resolution, the developer needs to locate the bug in a source code file and make code changes correspondingly to resolve the software bug. In fact, most of time of the developer is spent on bug location in the whole process of bug resolution. This study proposes a method level fine-grained bug location approach, called MethodLocator, to improve the efficiency of software bug resolution. Firstly, it takes the vector representation of the bug report and the source code method body using the word vector (Word2Vec) and TF-IDF. Secondly, MethodLocator augments method body of each method based on similarities among all method bodies in the source code files. Thirdly, MethodLocator locates methods for change to resolve the bug based on similarities between the bug report and the augmented methods. Experimental results on four open source software projects as ArgoUML, Ant, Maven, and Kylin demonstrate that MethodLocator is better than state-of-the-art techniques in method level bug location.