Machine Learning Empowered Software Defect Prediction System

Abstract

Production of high-quality software at lower cost has always been the main concern of developers. However, due to exponential increases in size and complexity, the development of qualitative software with lower costs is almost impossible. This issue can be resolved by identifying defects at the early stages of the development lifecycle. As a significant amount of resources are consumed in testing activities, if only those software modules are shortlisted for testing that is identified as defective, then the overall cost of development can be reduced with the assurance of high quality. An artificial neural network is considered as one of the extensively used machine-learning techniques for predicting defect-prone software modules. In this paper, a cloud-based framework for real-time software defect prediction is presented. In the proposed framework, empirical analysis is performed to compare the performance of four training algorithms of the back propagation technique on software-defect prediction: Bayesian regularization (BR), Scaled Conjugate Gradient, Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno Quasi Newton, and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms. The proposed framework also includes a fuzzy layer to identify the best training function based on performance. Publicly available cleaned versions of NASA datasets are used in this study. Various measures are used for performance evaluation including specificity, precision, recall, F-measure, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, accuracy, R2, and mean-square error. Two graphical user interface tools are developed in MatLab software to implement the proposed framework. The first tool is developed for comparing training functions as well as for extracting the results; the second tool is developed for the selection of the best training function using fuzzy logic. A BR training algorithm is selected by the fuzzy layer as itoutperformed the others in most of the performance measures. The accuracy of the BR training function is also compared with other widely used machine -learning techniques, from which it was found that the BR performed better among all training functions.