Software fault prediction at design phase

Abstract

Prediction of fault-prone modules continues to attract researcher's interest due to its significant impact on software development cost. The most important goal of such techniques is to correctly identify the modules where faults are most likely to present in early phases of software development lifecycle. Various software metrics related to modules level fault data have been successfully used for prediction of fault-prone modules. Goal of this research is to predict the faulty modules at design phase using design metrics of modules and faults related to modules. We have analyzed the effect of pre-processing and different machine learning schemes on eleven projects from NASA Metrics Data Program which offers design metrics and its related faults. Using seven machine learning and four preprocessing techniques we confirmed that models built from design metrics are surprisingly good at fault proneness prediction. The result shows that we should choose Naïve Bayes or Voting feature intervals with discretization for different data sets as they outperformed out of 28 schemes. Naïve Bayes and Voting feature intervals has performed AUC > 0.7 on average of eleven projects. Our proposed framework is effective and can predict an acceptable level of fault at design phases.