Studying and Automating Issue Resolution for Software Quality

Abstract

Effective issue resolution is crucial for maintaining software quality. Yet developers frequently encounter challenges such as low-quality issue reports, limited understanding of real-world workflows, and a lack of automated support. This research aims to address these challenges through three complementary directions. First, we enhance issue report quality by proposing techniques that leverage LLM reasoning and application-specific information. Second, we empirically characterize developer workflows in both traditional and AI-augmented systems. Third, we automate cognitively demanding resolution tasks, including buggy UI localization and solution identification, through ML, DL, and LLM-based approaches. Together, our work delivers empirical insights, practical tools, and automated methods to advance AI-driven issue resolution, supporting more maintainable and high-quality software systems.