A Hybrid Heuristic Approach for Scheduling Bug Fix Tasks to Software Developers

Large software projects usually maintain bug repositories where both developers and end users can report and track the resolution of software defects. These defects must be fixed and new versions of the software incorporating the patches that solve them must be released. The project manager must schedule a set of error correction tasks with different priorities in order to minimize the time required to make the next release available and guarantee that the more important issues were fixed. In this paper, we propose a hybrid heuristic approach based on an algorithm to schedule error correction tasks which combines a genetic algorithm and a constructive heuristic. We believe that our method can propose schedules for bug fix tasks with lower cost when compared to an adhoc schedule for non-trivial projects.