  Many automated program repair techniques have been proposed for fixing bugs.
Some of these techniques use the information beyond the given buggy program and
test suite to improve the quality of generated patches. However, there are
several limitations that hinder the wide adoption of these techniques,
including (1) they rely on a fixed set of repair templates for patch generation
or reference implementation, (2) searching for the suitable reference
implementation is challenging, (3) generated patches are not explainable.
Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across different
projects and one could use the GitHub issue from a different project for
finding new bugs for a related project. We propose collaborative bug fixing, a
novelapproach that suggests bug reports that describe a similar bug. Our
studyredefines similar bugs as bugs that share the (1) same libraries, (2) same
functionalities, (3) same reproduction steps, (4) same configurations, (5)
sameoutcomes, or (6) same errors. Moreover, our study revealed the usefulness
of similar bugs in helping developers in finding more context about the bug and
fixing. Based on our study, we design CrossFix, a tool that automatically
suggests relevant GitHub issues based on an open GitHub issue. Our evaluation
on 249 open issues from Java and Android projects shows that CrossFix could
suggest similar bugs to help developers in debugging and fixing.
