A novel feature to predict buggy changes in a software system

Abstract

Researchers have successfully implemented machine learning classifiers to predict bugs in a change file for years. Change classification focuses on determining if a new software change is clean or buggy. In the literature, several bug prediction methods at change level have been proposed to improve software reliability. This paper proposes a model for classification-based bug prediction model. Four supervised machine learning classifiers (Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forrest, and Naive Bayes) are applied to predict the bugs in software changes, and performance of these four classifiers are characterized. We considered a public dataset and downloaded the corresponding source code and its metrics. Thereafter, we produced new software metrics by analyzing source code at class level and unified these metrics with the existing set. We obtained new dataset to apply machine learning algorithms and compared the bug prediction accuracy of the newly defined metrics. Results showed that our merged dataset is practical for bug prediction based experiments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.