Improving Software Defect Prediction by Aggregated Change Metrics

Abstract

To ensure the delivery of high quality software, it is necessary to ensure that all of its artifacts function properly, which is usually done by performing appropriate tests with limited resources. It is therefore desirable to identify defective artifacts so that they can be corrected before the testing process. So far, researchers have proposed various predictive models for this purpose. Such models are typically trained on data representing previous project versions of a software and then used to predict which of the software artifacts in the new version are likely to be defective. However, the data representing a software project usually consists of measurable properties of the project or its modules, and leaves out information about the timeline of the software development process. To fill this gap, we propose a new set of metrics, namely aggregated change metrics, which are created by aggregating the data of all changes made to the software between two versions, taking into account the chronological order of the changes. In experiments conducted on open source projects written in Java, we show that the stability and performance of commonly used classification models are improved by extending a feature set to include both measurable properties of the analyzed software and the aggregated change metrics.