A Review of Metrics and Modeling Techniques in Software Fault Prediction Model Development

This paper surveys different software fault predictions progressed through different data analytic techniques reported in the software engineering literature. This study split in three broad areas; (a) The description of software metrics suites reported and validated in the literature. (b) A brief outline of previous research published in the development of software fault prediction model based on various analytic techniques. This utilizes the taxonomy of analytic techniques while summarizing published research. (c) A review of the advantages of using the combination of metrics. Though, this area is comparatively new and needs more research efforts

Analyze the Performance of Software by Machine Learning Methods for Fault Prediction Techniques

Trend of using the software in daily life is increasing day by day. Software system development is growing more difficult as these technologies are integrated into daily life. Therefore, creating highly effective software is a significant difficulty. The quality of any software system continues to be the most important element among all the required characteristics. Nearly one-third of the total cost of software development goes toward testing. Therefore, it is always advantageous to find a software bug early in the software development process because if it is not found early, it will drive up the cost of the software development. This type of issue is intended to be resolved via software fault prediction. There is always a need for a better and enhanced prediction model in order to forecast the fault before the real testing and so reduce the flaws in the time and expense of software projects. The various machine learning techniques for classifying software bugs are discussed in this paper

Predicting software faults in large space systems using machine learning techniques

Recently, the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms has proven to be of great practical value in solving a variety of engineering problems including the prediction of failure, fault, and defect-proneness as the space system software becomes complex. One of the most active areas of recent research in ML has been the use of ensemble classifiers. How ML techniques (or classifiers) could be used to predict software faults in space systems, including many aerospace systems is shown, and further use ensemble individual classifiers by having them vote for the most popular class to improve system software fault-proneness prediction. Benchmarking results on four NASA public datasets show the Naive Bayes classifier as more robust software fault prediction while most ensembles with a decision tree classifier as one of its components achieve higher accuracy rates

Predicting software faults in large space systems using machine learning techniques

Recently, the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms has proven to be of great practical value in solving a variety of engineering problems including the prediction of failure, fault, and defect-proneness as the space system software becomes complex. One of the most active areas of recent research in ML has been the use of ensemble classifiers. How ML techniques (or classifiers) could be used to predict software faults in space systems, including many aerospace systems is shown, and further use ensemble individual classifiers by having them vote for the most popular class to improve system software fault-proneness prediction. Benchmarking results on four NASA public datasets show the Naive Bayes classifier as more robust software fault prediction while most ensembles with a decision tree classifier as one of its components achieve higher accuracy rates

A Comparison and Evaluation of Variants in the Coupling Between Objects Metric

The Coupling Between Objects metric (CBO) is a widely-used metric but, in practice, ambiguities in its correct implementation have led to different values being computed by different metric tools and studies. CBO has often been shown to correlate with defect occurrence in software systems, but the use of different calculations is commonly overlooked. This paper investigates the varying interpretations of CBO used by those metrics tools and researchers and defines a set of metrics representing the different computational approaches used. These metrics are calculated for a large-scale Java system and logistic regression used to correlate them with defect data obtained by analysing the system’s version tracking records. The different variations of CBO are shown to have significantly different correlations to defects. Regarding results, a clear binary divide was found between CBO values which, on the one hand, predicted a defect and, on the other, those that did not. The results, therefore, show that a clarification or unambiguous re-definition of CBO is both desirable and essential for a general consensus on its use. Moreover, applications of the metric must pay close attention to the actual method of calculation being used and, conclusions and comparisons made as a result

Empirically-Grounded Construction of Bug Prediction and Detection Tools

There is an increasing demand on high-quality software as software bugs have an economic impact not only on software projects, but also on national economies in general. Software quality is achieved via the main quality assurance activities of testing and code reviewing. However, these activities are expensive, thus they need to be carried out efficiently. Auxiliary software quality tools such as bug detection and bug prediction tools help developers focus their testing and reviewing activities on the parts of software that more likely contain bugs. However, these tools are far from adoption as mainstream development tools. Previous research points to their inability to adapt to the peculiarities of projects and their high rate of false positives as the main obstacles of their adoption. We propose empirically-grounded analysis to improve the adaptability and efficiency of bug detection and prediction tools. For a bug detector to be efficient, it needs to detect bugs that are conspicuous, frequent, and specific to a software project. We empirically show that the null-related bugs fulfill these criteria and are worth building detectors for. We analyze the null dereferencing problem and find that its root cause lies in methods that return null. We propose an empirical solution to this problem that depends on the wisdom of the crowd. For each API method, we extract the nullability measure that expresses how often the return value of this method is checked against null in the ecosystem of the API. We use nullability to annotate API methods with nullness annotation and warn developers about missing and excessive null checks. For a bug predictor to be efficient, it needs to be optimized as both a machine learning model and a software quality tool. We empirically show how feature selection and hyperparameter optimizations improve prediction accuracy. Then we optimize bug prediction to locate the maximum number of bugs in the minimum amount of code by finding the most cost-effective combination of bug prediction configurations, i.e., dependent variables, machine learning model, and response variable. We show that using both source code and change metrics as dependent variables, applying feature selection on them, then using an optimized Random Forest to predict the number of bugs results in the most cost-effective bug predictor. Throughout this thesis, we show how empirically-grounded analysis helps us achieve efficient bug prediction and detection tools and adapt them to the characteristics of each software project