Failure is a Four-Letter Word ΓÇô A Parody in Empirical Research

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 3:22

Background: The past years have seen a surge of techniques predicting failure-prone locations based on more or less complex metrics. Few of these metrics are actionable, though. Aims: This paper explores a simple, easy-to-implement method to predict and avoid failures in software systems. The IROP method links elementary source code features to known software failures in a lightweight, easy-to-implement fashion. Method: We sampled the Eclipse data set mapping defects to files in three Eclipse releases. We used logistic regression to associate programmer actions with defects, tested the predictive power of the resulting classifier in terms of precision and recall, and isolated the most defect-prone actions. We also collected initial feedback on possible remedies. Results: In our sample set, IROP correctly predicted up to 74 With the abundance of software development data, even the simplest methods can produce ΓÇ£actionableΓÇ¥ results.