Software Defect Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Software defects and quality assurance are crucial aspects of software development that should be considered during the software development cycle. To ensure high-quality software, it is essential to have a robust quality assurance process in place. System reliability and quality are very key components that must be considered during software development, and this can only be achieved when software undergoes a thorough test process for errors, anomalies, defects, omissions, and bugs. Early software defect prediction and detection play an essential role in ensuring the reliability and quality of software systems, ensuring that software companies discover errors or defects early enough and allocate more resources to defect-prone modules. This study proposes the development of an enhanced classifier model for software defect prediction and detection. The aim is to harness the collective intelligence of selected base classifiers like Support Vector Machine, Logistic regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighbor, GaussianNB, and Multi-Layer Perception to improve accuracy, robustness, and generalization in identifying potential defects using a soft voting ensemble technique. The ensemble model leveraged the confidence probability of the soft voting technique and the generalization advantage of cross-validation leading to a more robust and dynamic model. The performance of the model with existing classifiers was evaluated using accuracy, F1 score, Precision, and area under the ROC curve (ROC- AUC) as the evaluation metrics. The results of the experiment revealed that the Proposed Classifier produced an overall Accuracy rate of 93%, and ROC AUC of 98%. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our enhanced ensemble classifier in software defect detection and prediction. By harnessing the strengths of diverse base classifiers, our approach provides a robust and adaptive solution to the challenges of early detection and mitigating defects in software systems. This research contributes to the advancement of reliable software development practices and lays the foundation for future enhancements in ensemble-based defect detection methodologies.

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) plays an active area in many research domain of Software Quality of Assurance (SQA). Many existing research studies are based on software traditional metric sets and defect prediction models are built in machine language to detect the bug for limited source code line. Inspired by the above existing system. In this paper, defect prediction is focused on predicting defects in source code. The objective of this thesis is to improve the software quality for accurate defect prediction is source code for file level. So, that it helps the developer to find the bug and fix the issue, to make better use of a resource which reduces the test effort, minimize the cost and improve the quality of software. A new approach is introduced to improve the prediction performance of Bidirectional RNNLM in Deep Neural Network. To build the defect prediction model a defect learner framework is proposed and first it need to build a Neural Language Model. Using this Language Model it helps to learn to deep semantic features in source code and it train & test the model. Based on language model it combined with software traditional metric sets to measure the code and find the defect. The probability of language model and metric set Cross-Entropy with Abstract Syntax Tree (CE-AST) metric is used to evaluate the defect proneness and set as a metric label. For classification the metric label K-NN classifier is used. BPTT algorithm for learning RNN will provide additional improvement, it improves the predictions performance to find the dynamic error.

A systematic literature review on software defect prediction using artificial intelligence: Datasets, Data Validation Methods, Approaches, and Tools

Recent studies of software defect prediction typically produce datasets, methods and frameworks which allow software engineers to focus on development activities in terms of defect-prone code, thereby improving software quality and making better use of resources. Many software defect prediction datasets, methods and frameworks are published disparate and complex, thus a comprehensive picture of the current state of defect prediction research that exists is missing. This literature review aims to identify and analyze the research trends, datasets, methods and frameworks used in software defect prediction research betweeen 2000 and 2013. Based on the defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 71 software defect prediction studies published between January 2000 and December 2013 were remained and selected to be investigated further. This literature review has been undertaken as a systematic literature review. Systematic literature review is defined as a process of identifying, assessing, and interpreting all available research evidence with the purpose to provide answers for specific research questions. Analysis of the selected primary studies revealed that current software defect prediction research focuses on five topics and trends: estimation, association, classification, clustering and dataset analysis. The total distribution of defect prediction methods is as follows. 77.46% of the research studies are related to classification methods, 14.08% of the studies focused on estimation methods, and 1.41% of the studies concerned on clustering and association methods. In addition, 64.79% of the research studies used public datasets and 35.21% of the research studies used private datasets. Nineteen different methods have been applied to predict software defects. From the nineteen methods, seven most applied methods in software defect prediction are identified. Researchers proposed some techniques for improving the accuracy of machine learning classifier for software defect prediction by ensembling some machine learning methods, by using boosting algorithm, by adding feature selection and by using parameter optimization for some classifiers. The results of this research also identified three frameworks that are highly cited and therefore influential in the software defect prediction field. They are Menzies et al. Framework, Lessmann et al. Framework, and Song et al. Framework.

Software defect prediction is an important issue in the process of software development and maintenance, which is related to the overall success or failure of software. This is because early software failure prediction can improve software quality, reliability and efficiency, and reduce software cost. However, developing robust defect prediction models is a challenging task and many techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, a software defect prediction model based on Novel Hybrid Genetics Software Defect Prediction (NHGSDP) is proposed. The supervised NHGSDP algorithm has been used to predict future software failures based on historical data. The evaluation process shows that the NHGSDP algorithm can be used effectively with high accuracy. The collected results show that the NHGSDP method has better performance.

Taxonomy of machine learning algorithms in software fault prediction using object oriented metrics

In recent years, machine learning techniques have been successfully applied into software defect prediction. Although they can yield reasonably good prediction results, there still exists much room for improvement on the aspect of prediction accuracy. Sparse representation is one of the most advanced machine learning techniques. It performs well with respect to signal compression and classification, but suffers from its time-consuming sparse coding. Compared with sparse representation, collaborative representation classification (CRC) can yield significantly lower computational complexity and competitive classification performance in pattern recognition domains. To achieve better defect prediction results, we introduce the CRC technique in this paper and propose a CRC based software defect prediction (CSDP) approach. We first design a CRC based learner to build a prediction model, whose computational burden is low. Then, we design a CRC based predictor to classify whether the query software modules are defective or defective-free. Experimental results on the widely used NASA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

It is a recurrent finding that software development is often troubled by considerable delays as well as budget overruns and several solutions have been proposed in answer to this observation, software fault prediction being a prime example. Drawing upon machine learning techniques, software fault prediction tries to identify upfront software modules that are most likely to contain faults, thereby streamlining testing efforts and improving overall software quality. When deploying fault prediction models in a production environment, both prediction performance and model comprehensibility are typically taken into consideration, although the latter is commonly overlooked in the academic literature. Many classification methods have been suggested to conduct fault prediction; yet associative classification methods remain uninvestigated in this context. This paper proposes an associative classification (AC)-based fault prediction method, building upon the CBA2 algorithm. In an empirical comparison on 12 real-world datasets, the AC-based classifier is shown to achieve a predictive performance competitive to those of models induced by five other tree/rule-based classification techniques. In addition, our findings also highlight the comprehensibility of the AC-based models, while achieving similar prediction performance. Furthermore, the possibilities of cross project prediction are investigated, strengthening earlier findings on the feasibility of such approach when insufficient data on the target project is available.

A novel software defect prediction based on atomic class-association rule mining

In recent years, machine learning technology has developed vigorously. The research on software defect prediction in the field of software engineering is increasingly adopting various algorithms of machine learning. This article has carried out a systematic literature review on the field of defect prediction. First, this article studies the development process of defect prediction, from correlation to prediction model. then this article studies the development process of cross-project defect prediction based on machine learning algorithms (naive Bayes, decision tree, random forest, neural network, etc.). Finally, this paper looks forward to the research difficulties and future directions of software defect prediction, such as imbalance in classification, cost of data labeling, and cross-project data distribution.

Software defect prediction is an important part to ensure software quality and increase cost-efficiency. The core aspect prior to software defect prediction is software metrics. More research of process metrics existed and rapidly developed as the fact that process metrics can outperform code metrics. The development of process metrics is diverse aligning with various process metrics generated in the different publication using different dataset and granularity level, thus the development state of process metrics need to be further tracked. Recent research on software defect prediction using process metrics has been carried which complements or argues another studied related to the implementation of process metrics, dataset, and granularity level. This literature review has collected 17 literature studies that aim to depict the current research used of software defect prediction applying software process metrics, dataset, and granularity. Seven commonly used process metrics are identified such as NDC, NML, ADEV, EXP, LA, LD, and COMM. Process metrics development has been implemented in the previous research such as the application of aggregated process metrics and commits detailed information metrics. The selected research shows that 87% of research are using a public dataset while the rest are using a combined dataset. This result depicts the limited accessibility of private and industrial dataset for defect prediction. Following analysis of software granularity presents 4 levels of granularity used in selected research such as a functional, class, file, and features level. File-level defect predictions are mostly used for defect prediction in selected research and prove good defect prediction performance. The results of this literature review also identify the proposed studies which is software defect prediction using developed process metrics in the different datasets and features-level granularity to strengthen the previous research.

Software dependency network metrics extracted from the dependency graph of the software modules by the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA metrics) have been shown to improve the performance of the Software Defect prediction (SDP) models. However, the relative effectiveness of these SNA metrics over code metrics in improving the performance of the SDP models has been widely debated with no clear consensus. Furthermore, some of the common SDP scenarios like predicting the number of defects in a module (Defect-count) in Cross-version and Cross-project SDP contexts remain unexplored. Such lack of clear directive on the effectiveness of SNA metrics when compared to the widely used code metrics prevents us from potentially building better performing SDP models. Therefore, through a case study of 9 open source software projects across 30 versions, we study the relative effectiveness of SNA metrics when compared to code metrics across 3 commonly used SDP contexts (Within-project, Cross-version and Cross-project) and scenarios (Defect-count, Defect-classification (classifying if a module is defective) and Effort-aware (ranking the defective modules w.r.t to the involved effort)). We find the SNA metrics by themselves or along with code metrics improve the performance of SDP models over just using code metrics on 5 out of the 9 studied SDP scenarios (three SDP scenarios across three SDP contexts). However, we note that in some cases the improvements afforded by considering SNA metrics over or alongside code metrics might only be marginal, whereas in other cases the improvements could be potentially large. Based on these findings we suggest that the future work should: consider SNA metrics alongside code metrics in their SDP models; as well as consider Ego metrics and Global metrics, the two different types of the SNA metrics separately when training SDP models as they behave differently.

Software practitioners develop models by considering the process of software fault prediction in the early stage of the software development life cycle in order to detect faulty modules. Various statistical and machine learning techniques are examined in the past for fault prediction. In this study, we have performed an empirical analysis of object-oriented (OO) metrics with a review of studies from the year 1996 to 2018 in the literature considering the statistical and machine learning techniques for software fault prediction. In this research, the concept of factor analysis and its sub-measures with regression are used to assess the capabilities for fault-proneness. The authors have also grouped the significant predictors i.e. CK and OO metrics using the factor analysis. In this paper, we have identified significant factor’s in five software’s datasets. The model is using the factor analysis with regression technique for estimating software fault-proneness. The results calculated prove the potential and capabilities of factor analysis for grouping important factors and using regression to identify the significant predictors. The experimental results obtained prove the ability of factor analysis with regression for predicting the susceptibility of software towards, the grouping of the components and effective use of the concept researchers and software practitioners. However, the significance and the application of the factor analysis with regression in software fault prediction are still limited and focus on these studies should be considered in order to generalize the results. On the basis of the results obtained, researchers are provided with future guidelines in this research work.

With the rise in the growth of the software industry, it is essential to identify software defects in earlier stages to save costs and improve the efficiency of the software development lifecycle process. We have devised a hybrid software defect prediction (SDP) model that integrates Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (Binary PSO), Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). BPSO is applied as a wrapper feature selection process utilizing AUC as a fitness function, SMOTE handles the dataset imbalance, and ANN is used as a classification algorithm for predicting software defects. We analyze the proposed BPSO-SMOTE-ANN model's predictive capability using the AUC and G-mean performance metrics. The proposed hybrid model is found helpful in predicting software defects. The statistical results suggest the enhanced performance of the proposed hybrid model concerning AUC and G-mean values. Also, the hybrid model was found to be competitive with other machine learning(ML) algorithms in determining software defects.

The world of software systems is amplified with the changing environment magnifying the demand for quality software. Software fault prediction is a requisite activity ensuring the development of economic, efficient and quality software. It is the procedure for the development of models which help to identify faults in modules during early phases of software development lifecycle. Software fault prediction is one of the most prevalent research disciplines. The existing study in this domain includes numerous modelling techniques and software metrics for the early predictions of software faults. This paper aims to explore some of the prominent studies for software fault prediction in the existing literature. In this paper, software fault prediction papers since 1990 to 2017 are investigated. The paper includes the analysis of the studies having empirical validation and a good source of publication. The paper reflects the methods, metrics, and datasets available in the literature for software fault prediction. In addition, the modelling techniques based on traditional and computational intelligence-based methods are also reviewed. This paper is an endeavour to assemble the existing techniques and metrics of software fault prediction with a motive to assist researchers for easy evaluation of suitable metrics for their own research scenarios.