Toward Intelligent Software Defect Detection

Source code level software defect detection has gone from state of the art to a software engineering best practice. Automated code analysis tools streamline many of the aspects of formal code inspections but have the drawback of being difficult to construct and either prone to false positives or severely limited in the set of defects that can be detected. Machine learning technology provides the promise of learning software defects by example, easing construction of detectors and broadening the range of defects that can be found. Pinpointing software defects with the same level of granularity as prominent source code analysis tools distinguishes this research from past efforts, which focused on analyzing software engineering metrics data with granularity limited to that of a particular function rather than a line of code

A Feature Ranking Algorithm in Pragmatic Quality Factor Model for Software Quality Assessment

Software quality is an important research area and has gain considerable attention from software engineering community in identification of priority quality attributes in software development process. This thesis describes original research in the field of software quality model by presenting a Feature Ranking Algorithm (FRA) for Pragmatic Quality Factor (PQF) model. The proposed algorithm is able to improve the weaknesses in PQF model in updating and learning the important attributes for software quality assessment. The existing assessment techniques lack of the capability to rank the quality attributes and data learning which can enhance the quality assessment process. The aim of the study is to identify and propose the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique for improving quality assessment technique in PQF model. Therefore, FRA using FRT was constructed and the performance of the FRA was evaluated. The methodology used consists of theoretical study, design of formal framework on intelligent software quality, identification of Feature Ranking Technique (FRT), construction and evaluation of FRA algorithm. The assessment of quality attributes has been improved using FRA algorithm enriched with a formula to calculate the priority of attributes and followed by learning adaptation through Java Library for Multi Label Learning (MULAN) application. The result shows that the performance of FRA correlates strongly to PQF model with 98% correlation compared to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Correlation Based Filter (KSCBF) algorithm with 83% correlation. Statistical significance test was also performed with score of 0.052 compared to the KSCBF algorithm with score of 0.048. The result shows that the FRA was more significant than KSCBF algorithm. The main contribution of this research is on the implementation of FRT with proposed Most Priority of Features (MPF) calculation in FRA for attributes assessment. Overall, the findings and contributions can be regarded as a novel effort in software quality for attributes selection

Prácticas de Desarrollo Software: Un Estudio Exploratorio con Herramientas de Análisis Estático

La investigación en ingeniería de software ha demostrado que la prevención de defectos desde el comienzo del desarrollo resulta menos costosa que corregirlos más tarde. En este sentido existen numerosos intentos por proveer herramientas con el objeto de sistematizar los procedimientos de análisis estático de código fuente. En este trabajo se analizó el potencial de cinco de estas herramientas seleccionadas por la actualidad de sus versiones, su disponibilidad y su utilización en investigaciones afines. Para el análisis, las herramientas se ejecutaron en el código fuente del software BlueJ, en sus diez últimas versiones, dado su amplio empleo tanto en el mercado de desarrollo de software como en el ámbito de instituciones educativas. Los resultados obtenidos del análisis, y sus conclusiones, acercan posibles soluciones a esta problemática que varía en alto grado conforme a los objetivos trazados por los equipos de desarrollo. El trabajo contribuye a facilitar la selección de herramientas apropiadas para el análisis estático de código fuente en equipos que están comenzando a incluir aspectos de calidad del producto software en las etapas tempranas del desarroll

Metric Evolution Maps:Multidimensional Attribute-driven Exploration of Software Repositories

Understanding how software entities in a repository evolve over time is challenging, as an entity has many aspects that undergo such changes. We cast this problem in a multidimensional visualization context: First, we capture change by extracting quality metrics from all software entities in all revisions in a software repository, yielding a multidimensional time-dependent dataset. Next, we propose Metric Evolution Maps (MEMs), a new visual approach to create dynamic maps that show the similarity of entities in a revision and changes across revisions. We enrich MEMs with visual cues to show which metrics and metric values are key to formation of similar-entity patterns. Additionally, we show how entities change between revisions, and due to which metrics. We illustrate our approach by exploring changes in two real-world software repositories

Enhancing Software Project Outcomes: Using Machine Learning and Open Source Data to Employ Software Project Performance Determinants

Many factors can influence the ongoing management and execution of technology projects. Some of these elements are known a priori during the project planning phase. Others require real-time data gathering and analysis throughout the lifetime of a project. These real-time project data elements are often neglected, misclassified, or otherwise misinterpreted during the project execution phase resulting in increased risk of delays, quality issues, and missed business opportunities. The overarching motivation for this research endeavor is to offer reliable improvements in software technology management and delivery. The primary purpose is to discover and analyze the impact, role, and level of influence of various project related data on the ongoing management of technology projects. The study leverages open source data regarding software performance attributes. The goal is to temper the subjectivity currently used by project managers (PMs) with quantifiable measures when assessing project execution progress. Modern-day PMs who manage software development projects are charged with an arduous task. Often, they obtain their inputs from technical leads who tend to be significantly more technical. When assessing software projects, PMs perform their role subject to the limitations of their capabilities and competencies. PMs are required to contend with the stresses of the business environment, the policies, and procedures dictated by their organizations, and resource constraints. The second purpose of this research study is to propose methods by which conventional project assessment processes can be enhanced using quantitative methods that utilize real-time project execution data. Transferability of academic research to industry application is specifically addressed vis-à-vis a delivery framework to provide meaningful data to industry practitioners

Visualizing multidimensional data similarities:Improvements and applications

Multidimensional data is increasingly more prominent and important in many application domains. Such data typically consist of a large set of elements, each of which described by several measurements (dimensions). During the design of techniques and tools to process this data, a key component is to gather insights into their structure and patterns, which can be described by the notion of similarity between elements. Among these techniques, multidimensional projections and similarity trees can effectively capture similarity patterns and handle a large number of data elements and dimensions. However, understanding and interpreting these patterns in terms of the original data dimensions is still hard. This thesis addresses the development of visual explanatory techniques for the easy interpretation of similarity patterns present in multidimensional projections and similarity trees, by several contributions. First, we propose methods that make the computation of similarity trees efficient for large datasets, and also enhance its visual representation to allow the exploration of more data in a limited screen. Secondly, we propose methods for the visual explanation of multidimensional projections in terms of groups of similar elements. These are automatically annotated to describe which dimensions are more important to define their notion of group similarity. We show next how these explanatory mechanisms can be adapted to handle both static and time-dependent data. Our proposed techniques are designed to be easy to use, work nearly automatically, and are demonstrated on a variety of real-world large data obtained from image collections, text archives, scientific measurements, and software engineering