BugCache for inspections: hit or miss?

  • Authors:

  • Foyzur Rahman;Daryl Posnett;Abram Hindle;Earl Barr;Premkumar Devanbu

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Inspection is a highly effective but costly technique for quality control. Most companies do not have the resources to inspect all the code; thus accurate defect prediction can help focus available inspection resources. BugCache is a simple, elegant, award-winning prediction scheme that "caches" files that are likely to contain defects [12]. In this paper, we evaluate the utility of BugCache as a tool for focusing inspection, we examine the assumptions underlying BugCache with the aim of improving it, and finally we compare it with a simple, standard bug-prediction technique. We find that BugCache is, in fact, useful for focusing inspection effort; but surprisingly, we find that its performance, when used for inspections, is not much better than a naive prediction model -- viz., a model that orders files in the system by their count of closed bugs and chooses enough files to capture 20% of the lines in the system.