Enhancing the defectiveness prediction of methods and classes via JIT

Abstract

Context: Defect prediction can help at prioritizing testing tasks by, for instance, ranking a list of items (methods and classes) according to their likelihood to be defective. While many studies investigated how to predict the defectiveness of commits, methods, or classes separately, no study investigated how these predictions differ or benefit each other. Specifically, at the end of a release, before the code is shipped to production, testing can be aided by ranking methods or classes, and we do not know which of the two approaches is more accurate. Moreover, every commit touches one or more methods in one or more classes; hence, the likelihood of a method and a class being defective can be associated with the likelihood of the touching commits being defective. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the accuracy of methods-defectiveness-predictions (MDP) and the class-defectiveness-predictions (CDP) are increased by leveraging commits-defectiveness-predictions (aka JIT). Objective: The contribution of this paper is fourfold: (i) We compare methods and classes in terms of defectiveness and (ii) of accuracy in defectiveness prediction, (iii) we propose and evaluate a first and simple approach that leverages JIT to increase MDP accuracy and (iv) CDP accuracy. Method: We analyse accuracy using two types of metrics (threshold-independent and effort-aware). We also use feature selection metrics, nine machine learning defect prediction classifiers, more than 2.000 defects related to 38 releases of nine open source projects from the Apache ecosystem. Our results are based on a ground truth with a total of 285,139 data points and 46 features among commits, methods and classes. Results: Our results show that leveraging JIT by using a simple median approach increases the accuracy of MDP by an average of 17% AUC and 46% PofB10 while it increases the accuracy of CDP by an average of 31% AUC and 38% PofB20. Conclusions: From a practitioner’s perspective, it is better to predict and rank defective methods than defective classes. From a researcher’s perspective, there is a high potential for leveraging statement-defectiveness-prediction (SDP) to aid MDP and CDP.