Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle

Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE); i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner. This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were resolved soon after their introduction. This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a significant result since it predicts that new development processes that promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi

The effect of locality based learning on software defect prediction

Software defect prediction poses many problems during classification. A common solution used to improve software defect prediction is to train on similar, or local, data to the testing data. Prior work [12, 64] shows that locality improves the performance of classifiers. This approach has been commonly applied to the field of software defect prediction. In this thesis, we compare the performance of many classifiers, both locality based and non-locality based. We propose a novel classifier called Clump, with the goals of improving classification while providing an explanation as to how the decisions were reached. We also explore the effects of standard clustering and relevancy filtering algorithms.;Through experimentation, we show that locality does not improve classification performance when applied to software defect prediction. The performance of the algorithms is impacted more by the datasets used than by the algorithmic choices made. More research is needed to explore locality based learning and the impact of the datasets chosen