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This retrospective on our 2011 MSR publication starts with the research milieu that led to the work reported in our paper. We brie y review the competing ideas of a decade ago that could be applied to solving the problem of identifying the les in a software library related to a query. We were especially interested in nding out if the more complex text retrieval methods of that time would be e ective in the software context. A surprising conclusion of our paper was that the reality was exactly the opposite: the more traditional simpler methods outperformed the complex methods. In addition to this surprising result, our paper was also the rst to report what was considered at that time a large-scale quantitative evaluation of the IR-based approaches to automatic bug localization. Over the years, such quantitative evaluations have become the norm. We believe that these contributions were largely responsible for the popularity of …