Leveraging the Power of Images: Image Recommendation to Enhance Issue Reports

ABSTRACT Background The trend of sharing images and image‐based social networks has eventually changed the landscape of social networks. Objective This study focuses on three primary objectives: (i) identifying issue reports that benefit from image sharing and processing in Bugzilla, (ii) identifying the type of image that would improve the bug report, and (iii) conducting a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the tool's performance and impact. Methods We trained machine‐learning and deep‐learning models on a dataset of 34,540 Bugzilla issue reports. The results are evaluated using quantitative performance metrics and a qualitative survey. Results Our prediction method achieves an F1‐score of 0.77 and about 75% of participants found it practically useful in our study. Conclusion This study and its associated dataset and methodology represent the first research on recommending images to developers for enhanced issue report communication. Our results illuminate a promising trajectory for enhanced and visual productivity tools for developers.