Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8781
Title: A general software defect-proneness prediction framework
Authors: Song, Q
Jia, Z
Shepperd, M
Ying, S
Liu, J
Keywords: Software defect prediction;Software defect-proneness prediction;Machine learning;Scheme evaluation
Issue Date: 2011
Publisher: IEEE
Citation: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 37(3), 356 - 370, 2011
Abstract: BACKGROUND - Predicting defect-prone software components is an economically important activity and so has received a good deal of attention. However, making sense of the many, and sometimes seemingly inconsistent, results is difficult. OBJECTIVE - We propose and evaluate a general framework for software defect prediction that supports 1) unbiased and 2) comprehensive comparison between competing prediction systems. METHOD - The framework is comprised of 1) scheme evaluation and 2) defect prediction components. The scheme evaluation analyzes the prediction performance of competing learning schemes for given historical data sets. The defect predictor builds models according to the evaluated learning scheme and predicts software defects with new data according to the constructed model. In order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework, we use both simulation and publicly available software defect data sets. RESULTS - The results show that we should choose different learning schemes for different data sets (i.e., no scheme dominates), that small details in conducting how evaluations are conducted can completely reverse findings, and last, that our proposed framework is more effective and less prone to bias than previous approaches. CONCLUSIONS - Failure to properly or fully evaluate a learning scheme can be misleading; however, these problems may be overcome by our proposed framework.
Description: This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
URI: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5611551
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8781
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.90
ISSN: 0098-5589
Appears in Collections:Computer Science
Dept of Computer Science Research Papers

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