Software Metrics Evaluation Based on Entropy

Software engineering activities in the Industry has come a long way with various improve- ments brought in various stages of the software development life cycle. The complexity of modern software, the commercial constraints and the expectation for high quality products demand the accurate fault prediction based on OO design metrics in the class level in the early stages of software development. The object oriented class metrics are used as quality predictors in the entire OO software development life cycle even when a highly iterative, incremental model or agile software process is employed. Recent research has shown some of the OO design metrics are useful for predicting fault-proneness of classes. In this paper the empirical validation of a set of metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer is performed to assess their ability in predicting the software quality in terms of fault proneness and degradation. We have also proposed the design complexity of object-oriented software with Weighted Methods per Class metric (WMC-CK metric) expressed in terms of Shannon entropy, and error proneness

An Approach for the Empirical Validation of Software Complexity Measures

Software metrics are widely accepted tools to control and assure software quality. A large number of software metrics with a variety of content can be found in the literature; however most of them are not adopted in industry as they are seen as irrelevant to needs, as they are unsupported, and the major reason behind this is due to improper empirical validation. This paper tries to identify possible root causes for the improper empirical validation of the software metrics. A practical model for the empirical validation of software metrics is proposed along with root causes. The model is validated by applying it to recently proposed and well known metrics

Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)

We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5 cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and 20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 201

Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)

We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5 cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and 20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE), 201

Is One Hyperparameter Optimizer Enough?

Hyperparameter tuning is the black art of automatically finding a good combination of control parameters for a data miner. While widely applied in empirical Software Engineering, there has not been much discussion on which hyperparameter tuner is best for software analytics. To address this gap in the literature, this paper applied a range of hyperparameter optimizers (grid search, random search, differential evolution, and Bayesian optimization) to defect prediction problem. Surprisingly, no hyperparameter optimizer was observed to be `best' and, for one of the two evaluation measures studied here (F-measure), hyperparameter optimization, in 50\% cases, was no better than using default configurations. We conclude that hyperparameter optimization is more nuanced than previously believed. While such optimization can certainly lead to large improvements in the performance of classifiers used in software analytics, it remains to be seen which specific optimizers should be applied to a new dataset.Comment: 7 pages, 2 columns, accepted for SWAN1

Comparison Study and Review on Object-Oriented Metrics

The best elucidations to software development problems are regularly touted as object-oriented processes. The popularity of object-oriented design metrics is essential in software engineering for measuring the software complexity, estimating size, quality and project efforts. There are various approaches through which we can find the software cost estimation and predicates on various kinds of deliverable items. Object-oriented metrics assures to reduce cost and the maintenance effort by serving as early predictors to estimate software faults. Such an early quantification augments the quality of the final software. This paper reviews object-oriented metrics. A comparison table is maintained via which we can analyze the difference between all the object-oriented metrics effectively

DISC: Deep Image Saliency Computing via Progressive Representation Learning

Salient object detection increasingly receives attention as an important component or step in several pattern recognition and image processing tasks. Although a variety of powerful saliency models have been intensively proposed, they usually involve heavy feature (or model) engineering based on priors (or assumptions) about the properties of objects and backgrounds. Inspired by the effectiveness of recently developed feature learning, we provide a novel Deep Image Saliency Computing (DISC) framework for fine-grained image saliency computing. In particular, we model the image saliency from both the coarse- and fine-level observations, and utilize the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the saliency representation in a progressive manner. Specifically, our saliency model is built upon two stacked CNNs. The first CNN generates a coarse-level saliency map by taking the overall image as the input, roughly identifying saliency regions in the global context. Furthermore, we integrate superpixel-based local context information in the first CNN to refine the coarse-level saliency map. Guided by the coarse saliency map, the second CNN focuses on the local context to produce fine-grained and accurate saliency map while preserving object details. For a testing image, the two CNNs collaboratively conduct the saliency computing in one shot. Our DISC framework is capable of uniformly highlighting the objects-of-interest from complex background while preserving well object details. Extensive experiments on several standard benchmarks suggest that DISC outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and it also generalizes well across datasets without additional training. The executable version of DISC is available online: http://vision.sysu.edu.cn/projects/DISC.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (T-NNLS), 201

Analysing the Contribution of Coupling Metrics for the Development and Management of Process Architectures

Currently, the development and modeling of enterprise architectures is an intensively discussed topic in both science and practice. Process architectures represent a core element in recent enterprise architecture frameworks. With process models being a central means for communicating and documenting the process architectures, both their quality and understandability are decisive. However, the concept of process model quality is still not fully understood. The recent development has highlighted the role of coupling in models. Coupling is expected to represent an important dimension of quality for conceptual models. Still, this perspective is hardly understood and its definition vague. Therefore, this work collects diverse coupling interpretations in the field of process modelling and integrates them to a common and precise definition. Once introduced and formally specified, the metrics serve as a basis for a discussion on coupling and on how the future development in respect to coupling could look like. The main findings are that currently metrics evaluate either the documentation of the process architecture regarding its understandability or they contribute to the individual applications of process architectures. These findings support practitioners selecting metrics for a particular task and scientists to identify research gaps for further development