Merits of using repository metrics in defect prediction for open source projects

  • Authors:
  • Bora Caglayan;Ayse Bener;Stefan Koch

  • Affiliations:
  • Boğaziçi University, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul, Turkey;Boğaziçi University, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul, Turkey;Boğaziçi University, Department of Management, Istanbul, Turkey

  • Venue:
  • FLOSS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Many corporate code developers are the beta testers of open source software.They continue testing until they are sure that they have a stable version to build their code on. In this respect defect predictors play a critical role to identify defective parts of the software. Performance of a defect predictor is determined by correctly finding defective parts of the software without giving any false alarms. Having high false alarms means testers/ developers would inspect bug free code unnecessarily. Therefore in this research we focused on decreasing the false alarm rates by using repository metrics. We conducted experiments on the data sets of Eclipse project. Our results showed that repository metrics decreased the false alarm rates on the average to 23% from 32% corresponding up to 907 less files to inspect.