Empirical evaluation of defect identification indicators and defect prediction models

Abstract: Context. Quality assurance plays a vital role in the software engineering development process. It can be considered as one of the activities, to observe the execution of software project to validate if it behaves as expected or not. Quality assurance activities contribute to the success of software project by reducing the risks of software’s quality. Accurate planning, launching and controlling quality assurance activities on time can help to improve the performance of software projects. However, quality assurance activities also consume time and cost. One of the reasons is that they may not focus on the potential defect-prone area. In some of the latest and more accurate findings, researchers suggested that quality assurance activities should focus on the scope that may have the potential of defect; and defect predictors should be used to support them in order to save time and cost. Many available models recommend that the project’s history information be used as defect indicator to predict the number of defects in the software project. Objectives. In this thesis, new models are defined to predict the number of defects in the classes of single software systems. In addition, the new models are built based on the combination of product metrics as defect predictors. Methods. In the systematic review a number of article sources are used, including IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Springer Link, in order to find the existing models related to the topic. In this context, open source projects are used as training sets to extract information about occurred defects and the system evolution. The training data is then used for the definition of the prediction models. Afterwards, the defined models are applied on other systems that provide test data, so information that was not used for the training of the models; to validate the accuracy and correctness of the models Results. Two models are built. One model is built to predict the number of defects of one class. One model is built to predict whether one class contains bug or no bug.. Conclusions. The proposed models are the combination of product metrics as defect predictors that can be used either to predict the number of defects of one class or to predict if one class contains bugs or no bugs. This combination of product metrics as defect predictors can improve the accuracy of defect prediction and quality assurance activities; by giving hints on potential defect prone classes before defect search activities will be performed. Therefore, it can improve the software development and quality assurance in terms of time and cost