Each year, software engineers spend over half of their time testing and fixing their software. In terms of financial commitment, this means that economies around the globe allocate billions — even trillions — in resources, not to creation but instead for cleaning up mistakes. Even after launch, the fallout from software errors continues. With each update, each new piece of hardware, each relaunch, users encounter new bugs. As new reports continue to roll in, the software needs to be repaired.

Bug reports are one of the most important tools in the arsenal of a software developer, provide them with the information they need to replicate the conditions that lead to the error, and track down the source of the problem. While this process has long been a staple of post-release debugging and repair, it is wildly inefficient. That’s because these reports are written in natural language, with all the variety and ambiguousness that is associated with human speech. The costs, moreover, are steep: companies invest millions into repairing their software and with good reason. Software testing company Tricentis estimated that in the anglophone world alone, software malfunctions cost $1.7 trillion in lost revenue in 2017. The incentive to speed-up and improve the bug response process, and with it the software repair process, is only set to grow. In fact, the global market for bug tracking software is expected to triple by 2026.