Predicting component failures at design time

  • Authors:

  • Adrian Schröter;Thomas Zimmermann;Andreas Zeller

  • Affiliations:

  • Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

How do design decisions impact the quality of the resulting software? In an empirical study of 52 ECLIPSE plug-ins, we found that the software design as well as past failure history, can be used to build models which accurately predict failure-prone components in new programs. Our prediction only requires usage relationships between components, which are typically defined in the design phase; thus, designers can easily explore and assess design alternatives in terms of predicted quality. In the ECLIPSE study, 90% of the 5% most failure-prone components, as predicted by our model from design data, turned out to actually produce failures later; a random guess would have predicted only 33%.