Empirical analysis on the correlation between GCC compiler warnings and revision numbers of source files in five industrial software projects

Authors:
Raimund Moser;Barbara Russo;Giancarlo Succi
Affiliations:
Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy 39100;Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy 39100;Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy 39100
Venue:
Empirical Software Engineering
Year:
2007

Citing 17
Cited 0

Investigating data quality problems in the PSP

SIGSOFT '98/FSE-6 Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Effort estimation and prediction of object-oriented systems

Journal of Systems and Software
Estimation of effort and complexity: an object-oriented case study

Journal of Systems and Software
Predicting Fault Incidence Using Software Change History

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Applying meta-analytical procedures to software engineering experiments

Journal of Systems and Software
The prediction of faulty classes using object-oriented design metrics

Journal of Systems and Software
An Empirical Method for Selecting Software Reliability Growth Models

Empirical Software Engineering
Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List

Computer
Implementing Effective Software Metrics Programs

IEEE Software
Quantitative Analysis of Faults and Failures in a Complex Software System

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Beyond the Personal Software Process: metrics collection and analysis for the differently disciplined

Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering
What We Have Learned About Fighting Defects

METRICS '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Software Metrics
A Light-Weight Process for Capturing and Evolving Defect Reduction Experience

ICECCS '02 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems
Collecting, Integrating and Analyzing Software Metrics and Personal Software Process Data

EUROMICRO '03 Proceedings of the 29th Conference on EUROMICRO
Test-Driven Development as a Defect-Reduction Practice

ISSRE '03 Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
Cost, quality and user satisfaction of software products: an empirical analysis

CASCON '93 Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research: software engineering - Volume 1
An Empirical Exploration of the Distributions of the Chidamber and Kemerer Object-Oriented Metrics Suite

Empirical Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This article discusses whether using warnings generated by the GNU C++ compiler can be used effectively to identify source code files that are likely to be error prone. We analyze five industrial projects written in C++ and belonging to the telecommunication domain. We find a significant positive correlation between the number of compiler warnings and the number of source files changes. We use such correlation to conclude that compiler warnings may be used as an indicator for the presence of software defects in source code. The result of this research is useful for finding defect-prone modules in newer projects, which lack change history.