Predicting fault-prone components in a Java legacy system

Erik Arisholm, Lionel C. Briand

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paper reports on the construction and validation of fault-proneness prediction models in the context of an object-oriented, evolving, legacy system. The goal is to help QA engineers focus their limited verification resources on parts of the system likely to contain faults. A number of measures including code quality, class structure, changes in class structure, and the history of class-level changes and faults are included as candidate predictors of class fault-proneness. A cross-validated classification analysis shows that the obtained model has less than 20% of false positives and false negatives, respectively. However, as shown in this paper, statistics regarding the classification accuracy tend to inflate the potential usefulness of the fault-proneness prediction models. We thus propose a simple and pragmatic methodology for assessing the cost-effectiveness of the predictions to focus verification effort. On the basis of the cost-effectiveness analysis we show that change and fault data from previous releases is paramount to developing a practically useful prediction model. When our model is applied to predict faults in a new release, the estimated potential savings in verification effort is about 29%. In contrast, the estimated savings in verification effort drops to 0% when history data is not included.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationISCE'06 - Proceedings of the 5th ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
Pages8-17
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
EventISCE'06 - 5th ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Duration: 21 Sep 200622 Sep 2006

Publication series

NameISESE'06 - Proceedings of the 5th ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
Volume2006

Conference

ConferenceISCE'06 - 5th ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityRio de Janeiro
Period21/09/0622/09/06

Keywords

  • Design
  • Measurement
  • Verification

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