Putting It All Together: Using Socio-technical Networks to Predict Failures

  • Authors:

  • Christian Bird;Nachiappan Nagappan;Harald Gall;Brendan Murphy;Premkumar Devanbu

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ISSRE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 20th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Studies have shown that social factors in development organizations have adramatic effect on software quality.Separately,program dependencyinformation has also been used successfully to predict which software componentsare more fault prone. Interestingly, the influence of these two phenomenahaveonly been studied separately.Intuition and practical experience suggests,however, that task assignment (i.e. who worked on which components and howmuch) and dependency structure (which components have dependencies on others)together interact toinfluence the quality of the resulting software.Westudy the influence ofcombined socio-technical software networks onthe fault-proneness of individual software components within a system.Thenetworkproperties of a software component in thiscombined network are ableto predict if an entity is failure prone with greater accuracy than priormethods which use dependency or contribution information in isolation.Weevaluate our approach in different settings by using it on Windows Vista andacross six releases of the Eclipse development environment including usingmodels built from one release to predict failure prone components in the nextrelease.We compare this to previous work.In every case, our method performsas well or better and is able to more accurately identify those softwarecomponents that have more post-release failures, with precision and recallrates as high as 85%.