Theory of relative defect proneness

  • Authors:

  • A. Güneş Koru;Khaled El Emam;Dongsong Zhang;Hongfang Liu;Divya Mathew

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Systems, UMBC, Baltimore, USA 21250;Childrens Hospital of Eastern Ontario, CHEO Research Institute, E-Health Information Laboratory, Ottawa, Canada K1H 8L1 and Faculty of Medicine and School of Information Technology, University of ...;Department of Information Systems, UMBC, Baltimore, USA 21250;Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Biomathematics, School of Medicine, Georgetown University, Washington, USA 20057-1484;Department of Information Systems, UMBC, Baltimore, USA 21250

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this study, we investigated the functional form of the size-defect relationship for software modules through replicated studies conducted on ten open-source products. We consistently observed a power-law relationship where defect proneness increases at a slower rate compared to size. Therefore, smaller modules are proportionally more defect prone. We externally validated the application of our results for two commercial systems. Given limited and fixed resources for code inspections, there would be an impressive improvement in the cost-effectiveness, as much as 341% in one of the systems, if a smallest-first strategy were preferred over a largest-first one. The consistent results obtained in this study led us to state a theory of relative defect proneness (RDP): In large-scale software systems, smaller modules will be proportionally more defect-prone compared to larger ones. We suggest that practitioners consider our results and give higher priority to smaller modules in their focused quality assurance efforts.