Survey on Software Defect Prediction

Survey onSoftware Defect Prediction

- PhD Qualifying Examination -

July 3, 2014Jaechang Nam

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Outline

• Background• Software Defect Prediction Approaches– Simple metric and defect estimation models– Complexity metrics and Fitting models– Prediction models– Just-In-Time Prediction Models– Practical Prediction Models and Applications– History Metrics from Software Repositories– Cross-Project Defect Prediction and

Feasibility

• Summary and Challenging Issues

Motivation• General question of software defect

prediction– Can we identify defect-prone entities (source

code file, binary, module, change,...) in advance?• # of defects• buggy or clean

• Why?– Quality assurance for large software

(Akiyama@IFIP’71)

– Effective resource allocation• Testing (Menzies@TSE`07)

• Code review (Rahman@FSE’11)

Ground Assumption

• The more complex, the more defect-prone

Two Focuses on Defect Prediction

• How much complex is software and its process?– Metrics

• How can we predict whether software has defects?– Models based on the metrics

Prediction Performance Goal

• Recall vs. Precision

• Strong predictor criteria– 70% recall and 25% false positive rate

(Menzies@TSE`07)

– Precision, recall, accuracy ≥ 75% (Zimmermann@FSE`09)

Outline

Feasibility

Defect Prediction Approaches1970

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Identifying Defect-prone Entities

• Akiyama’s equation (Ajiyama@IFIP`71)

– # of defects = 4.86 + 0.018 * LOC (=Lines Of Code)

• 23 defects in 1 KLOC• Derived from actual systems

• Limitation– Only LOC is not enough to capture software

complexity

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Fitting Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

Complexity Metrics and Fitting Models

• Cyclomatic complexity metrics (McCabe`76)

– “Logical complexity” of a program represented in control flow graph

– V(G) = #edge – #node + 2

• Halstead complexity metrics (Halsted`77)

– Metrics based on # of operators and operands

– Volume = N * log2n

– # of defects = Volume / 3000

Complexity Metrics and Fitting Models

• Limitation– Do not capture complexity (amount) of

change.– Just fitting models but not prediction

models in most of studies conducted in 1970s and early 1980s• Correlation analysis between metrics and # of

defects– By linear regression models

• Models were not validated for new entities (modules).

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Fitting ModelPrediction Model (Regression)

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

Process Metrics

Prediction Model (Classification)

Regression Model• Shen et al.’s empirical study (Shen@TSE`85)

– Linear regression model– Validated on actual new modules– Metrics

• Halstead, # of conditional statements• Process metrics

– Delta of complexity metrics between two successive system versions

– Measures• Between actual and predicted # of defects on new

modules– MRE (Mean magnitude of relative error)

» average of (D-D’)/D for all modules• D: actual # of defects• D’: predicted # of defects

» MRE = 0.48

Classification Model• Discriminative analysis by Munson et al.

(Munson@TSE`92)

• Logistic regression• High risk vs. low risk modules• Metrics

– Halstead and Cyclomatic complexity metrics

• Measure– Type I error: False positive rate– Type II error: False negative rate

• Result– Accuracy: 92% (6 misclassifi cation out of 78 modules)– Precision: 85%– Recall: 73%– F-measure: 88%

Defect Prediction Process(Based on Machine Learning)

Classification /Regression

SoftwareArchives

Instances withmetrics

(features) and labels

Training Instances

(Preprocessing)

New instances

Generate

Instances

Builda

Defect Prediction(Based on Machine Learning)

• Limitations– Limited resources for process metrics

• Error fix in unit testing phase was conducted informally by an individual developer (no error information available in this phase). (Shen@TSE`85)

– Existing metrics were not enough to capture complexity of object-oriented (OO) programs.

– Helpful for quality assurance team but not for individual developers

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

Process Metrics

Just-In-Time Prediction Model

Practical Model and Applications

History Metrics

CK Metrics

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

Process Metrics

History Metrics

CK Metrics

Risk Prediction of Software Changes

(Mockus@BLTJ`00)• Logistic regression• Change metrics

– LOC added/deleted/modified– Diffusion of change– Developer experience

• Result– Both false positive and false negative rate:

20% in the best case

Risk Prediction of Software Changes

(Mockus@BLTJ`00)• Advantage

– Show the feasible model in practice

• Limitation– Conducted 3 times per week

• Not fully Just-In-Time

– Validated on one commercial system (5ESS switching system software)

BugCache (Kim@ICSE`07)

• Maintain defect-prone entities in a cache• Approach

• Result– Top 10% files account for 73-95% of defects on 7

systems

BugCache (Kim@ICSE`07)

• Advantages– Cache can be updated quickly with less cost. (c.f.

static models based on machine learning)– Just-In-Time: always available whenever QA teams

want to get the list of defect-prone entities

• Limitations– Cache is not reusable for other software projects.– Designed for QA teams

• Applicable only in a certain time point after a bunch of changes (e.g., end of a sprint)

• Still limited for individual developers in development phase

Change Classification (Kim@TSE`08)

• Classification model based on SVM• About 11,500 features

– Change metadata such as changed LOC, change count

– Complexity metrics– Text features from change log messages, source

code, and file names

• Results– 78% accuracy and 60% recall on average from 12

open-source projects

Change Classification (Kim@TSE`08)

• Limitations– Heavy model (11,500 features)– Not validated on commercial software products.

Follow-up Studies• Studies addressing limitations

– “Reducing Features to Improve Code Change-Based Bug Prediction” (Shivaj i@TSE`13)

• With less than 10% of all features, buggy F-measure is 21% improved.

– “Software Change Classification using Hunk Metrics” (Ferzund@ICSM`09)

• 27 hunk-level metrics for change classification• 81% accuracy, 77% buggy hunk precision, and 67% buggy hunk

recall

– “A large-scale empirical study of just-in-time quality assurance” (Kamei@TSE`13)

• 14 process metrics (mostly from Mockus`00)• 68% accuracy, 64% recall on 11open-source and commercial

projects

– “An Empirical Study of Just-In-Time Defect Prediction Using Cross-Project Models” (Fukushima@MSR`14)

• Median AUC: 0.72

Challenges of JIT model

• Practical validation is difficult– Just 10-fold cross validation in current

literature– No validation on real scenario

• e.g., online machine learning

• Still difficult to review huge change– Fine-grained prediction within a change

• e.g., Line-level prediction

Next Steps of Defect Prediction

1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Online Learning JIT Model

Prediction Model (Regression)

Process Metrics

Metrics

Fine-grained Prediction

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

Process Metrics

History Metrics

CK Metrics

Defect Prediction in Industry• “Predicting the location and number of faults

in large software systems” (Ostrand@TSE`05)– Two industrial systems– Recall 86%– 20% most fault-prone modules account for 62%

faults

Case Study for Practical Model

• “Does Bug Prediction Support Human Developers? Findings From a Google Case Study” (Lewis@ICSE`13)

– No identifiable change in developer behaviors after using defect prediction model

• Required characteristics but very challenging– Actionable messages / obvious reasoning

1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Actionable Defect

Prediction

Process Metrics

Metrics

Evaluation Measure for Practical Model

• Measure prediction performance based on code review effort

• AUCEC (Area Under Cost Effectiveness Curve)

Percent of LOC

50%10%

Rahman@FSE`11, Bugcache for inspections: Hit or miss?

Practical Application

• What else can we do more with defect prediction models?– Test case selection on regression testing

(Engstrom@ICST`10)

– Prioritizing warnings from FindBugs (Rahman@ICSE`14)

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK MetricsProcess Metrics

History Metrics

Representative OO Metrics

Metric Description

WMC Weighted Methods per Class (# of methods)

DIT Depth of Inheritance Tree ( # of ancestor classes)

NOC Number of Children

CBO Coupling between Objects (# of coupled classes)

RFC Response for a class: WMC + # of methods called by the class)

LCOM Lack of Cohesion in Methods (# of "connected components”)

• CK metrics (Chidamber&Kemerer@TSE`94)

• Prediction Performance of CK vs. code (Basili@TSE`96)

– F-measure: 70% vs. 60%

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK MetricsProcess Metrics

History Metrics

Representative History Metrics

Name# of

metrics

Metric source Citation

Relative code change churn 8 SW Repo.* Nagappan@ICSE`05

Change 17 SW Repo. Moser@ICSE`08

Change Entropy 1 SW Repo. Hassan@ICSE`09

Code metric churnCode Entropy 2 SW Repo. D’Ambros@MSR`10

Popularity 5 Email archive

Bacchelli@FASE`10

Ownership 4 SW Repo. Bird@FSE`11

Micro Interaction Metrics (MIM) 56 Mylyn Lee@FSE`11

* SW Repo. = version control system + issue tracking system

Representative History Metrics

• Advantage– Better prediction performance than code metrics

Moser`08 Hassan`09 D'Ambros`10 Bachille`10 Bird`11 Lee`110.0%

Performance Improvement(all metrics vs. code complexity metrics)

(F-measure) (F-measure)(Absoluteprediction

error)

(Spearmancorrelation)

(Spearmancorrelation*)

(*Bird`10’s results are from two metrics vs. code metrics, No comparison data in Nagappan`05)

PerformanceImprovement

History Metrics

• Limitations– History metrics do not extract particular program

characteristics such as developer social network, component network, and anti-pattern.

– Noise data• Bias in Bug-Fix Dataset (Bird@FSE`09)

– Not applicable for new projects and projects lacking in historical data

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Cross-Project Prediction

Universal

Process Metrics

Cross-Project Feasibility

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Noise Reduction

Semi-supervised/active

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Noise Reduction

Other Metrics

Name# of

metrics

Metric source Citation

Component network 28

Binaries(Windows

Server 2003)

Zimmermann@ICSE`08

Developer-Module network 9 SW Repo. + Binaries

Pinzger@FSE`08

Developer social network 4 SW Repo. Meenely@FSE`08

Anti-pattern 4

SW Repo. +

Design-pattern

Taba@ICSM`13

* SW Repo. = version control system + issue tracking system

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Noise Reduction

• Noise detection and elimination algorithm (Kim@ICSE`11)

– Closest List Noise Identification (CLNI)• Based on Euclidean distance between instances

– Average F-measure improvement• 0.504 0.621

• Relink (Wo@FSE`11)

– Recover missing links between bugs and changes

– 60% 78% recall for missing links– F-measure improvement

• e.g. 0.698 (traditional) 0.731 (ReLink)

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Defect Prediction for New Software Projects

• Universal Defect Prediction Model

• Simi-supervised / active learning

• Cross-Project Defect Prediction

Universal Defect Prediction Model

(Zhang@MSR`14)• Context-aware rank transformation– Transform metric values ranged from 1 to 10

across all projects.

• Model built by 1398 projects collected from SourceForge and Google code

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Other approaches for CDDP

• Semi-supervised learning with dimension reduction for defect prediction (Lu@ASE`12)

– Training a model by a small set of labeled instances together with many unlabeled instances

– AUC improvement• 0.83 0.88 with 2% labeled instances

• Sample-based semi-supervised/active learning for defect prediction (Li@AESEJ`12)

– Average F-measure• 0.628 0.685 with 10% sampled instances

s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Cross-Project Defect Prediction

(CPDP)• For a new project or a project

lacking in the historical data

Training

Project A Project B

Only 2% out of 622 prediction combinations worked. (Zimmermann@FSE`09)

Transfer Learning (TL)

Traditional Machine Learning (ML)

Learning

System

Learning

System

Transfer Learning

Learning

System

Learning

System

Knowledge

Transfer

Pan et al.@TNN`10, Domain Adaptation via Transfer Component Analysis

• Adopting transfer learning

Transfer learning

Metric Compensation

NN Filter TNB TCA+

Preprocessing N/AFeature

selection,Log-filter

Log-filter Normalization

Machine learner

C4.5 Naive Bayes TNBLogistic

Regression

# of Subjects 2 10 10 8

# of predictions

2 10 10 26

Avg. f-measure0.67

(W:0.79, C:0.58)0.35

(W:0.37, C:0.26)

0.39(NN: 0.35,

C:0.33)

0.46(W:0.46, C:0.36)

Citation Watanabe@PROMISE`08

Turhan@ESEJ`09 Ma@IST`12 Nam@ICSE`13

* NN = Nearest neighbor, W = Within, C = Cross

Metric Compensation (Watanabe@PROMISE`08)

• Key idea

• New target metric value =target metric value * average source

metric value average target metric value

Source Target New Target

Let me transform like source!

Metric Compensation (cont.)(Watanabe@PROMISE`08)

Transfer learning

Metric Compensation

NN Filter TNB TCA+

Machine learner

Regression

# of predictions

2 10 10 26

Avg. f-measure0.67

(W:0.79, C:0.58)0.35

(W:0.37, C:0.26)

0.39(NN: 0.35,

C:0.33)

0.46(W:0.46, C:0.36)

NN filter(Turhan@ESEJ`09)

• Key idea

• Nearest neighbor filter– Select 10 nearest source instances of

each target instance

New Source Target

Hey, you look like me! Could you be my model?

Source

NN filter (cont.)(Turhan@ESEJ`09)

Transfer learning

Metric Compensation

NN Filter TNB TCA+

Machine learner

Regression

# of predictions

2 10 10 26

Avg. f-measure0.67

(W:0.79, C:0.58)0.35

(W:0.37, C:0.26)

0.39(NN: 0.35,

C:0.33)

0.46(W:0.46, C:0.36)

Transfer Naive Bayes(Ma@IST`12)

• Key idea

Target

Hey, you look like me! You will get more chance to be my best model!

Source

Provide more weight to similar source instances to build a Naive Bayes Model

Build a model

Please, consider me more important than other instances

I’m not that

important!

Transfer Naive Bayes (cont.)(Ma@IST`12)

• Transfer Naive Bayes

– New prior probability

– New conditional probability

• How to find similar source instances for target– A similarity score

– A weight value

F1 F2 F3 F4Score

Max of target 7 3 2 5 -

src. inst 1 5 4 2 2 3

src. inst 2 0 2 5 9 1

Min of target 1 2 0 1 -

k=# of features, si=score of instance i

Transfer learning

Metric Compensation

NN Filter TNB TCA+

Machine learner

Regression

# of predictions

2 10 10 26

Avg. f-measure0.67

(W:0.79, C:0.58)0.35

(W:0.37, C:0.26)

0.39(NN: 0.35,

C:0.33)

0.46(W:0.46, C:0.36)

TCA+(Nam@ICSE`13)

• Key idea– TCA (Transfer Component Analysis)

Source Target

Oops, we are different! Let’s meet in another world!

New Source New Target

Transfer Component Analysis (cont.)

• Feature extraction approach– Dimensionality reduction– Projection• Map original data

in a lower-dimensional feature space

1-dimensional feature space

2-dimensional feature space

TCA (cont.)

Target domain dataSource domain data

TCA (cont.)

TCA+(Nam@ICSE`13)

Source Target

Oops, we are different! Let’s meet at another world!

But, we are still a bit different!

Source Target

Oops, we are different! Let’s meet at another world!

Normalize US together!

TCATCA+

Normalization Options

• NoN: No normalization applied

• N1: Min-max normalization (max=1, min=0)

• N2: Z-score normalization (mean=0, std=1)

• N3: Z-score normalization only using source mean and standard deviation

• N4: Z-score normalization only using target mean and standard deviation

Preliminary Results using TCA

F-measure

*Baseline: Cross-project defect prediction without TCA and normalization

Prediction performance of TCA varies according to different

normalization options!Baseline NoN N1 N2 N3 N4

Baseline NoN N1 N2 N3 N4

Project A Project B

Project B Project A

TCA+: Decision Rules

• Find a suitable normalization for TCA

• Steps–#1: Characterize a dataset–#2: Measure similarity

between source and target datasets

–#3: Decision rules

TCA+: #1. Characterize a Dataset

Dataset A

Dataset B

DIST={dij : i,j, 1 ≤ i < n, 1 < j ≤ n, i < j}

TCA+: #2. Measure Similarity between Source and Target

• Minimum (min) and maximum (max) values of DIST

• Mean and standard deviation (std) of DIST• The number of instances

TCA+: #3. Decision Rules

• Rule #1– Mean and Std are same NoN

• Rule #2– Max and Min are different N1 (max=1,

min=0)

• Rule #3,#4– Std and # of instances are different

N3 or N4 (src/tgt mean=0, std=1)

• Rule #5– Default N2 (mean=0, std=1)

TCA+ (cont.)(Nam@ICSE`13)

Transfer learning

Metric Compensation

NN Filter TNB TCA+

Machine learner

Regression

# of predictions

2 10 10 26

Avg. f-measure0.67

(W:0.79, C:0.58)0.35

(W:0.37, C:0.26)

0.39(NN: 0.35,

C:0.33)

0.46(W:0.46, C:0.36)

Current CPDP using TL• Advantages

– Comparable prediction performance to within-prediction models

– Benefit from the state-of-the-art TL approaches

• Limitation– Performance of some cross-prediction pairs is still

poor. (Negative Transfer)

Source Target

Defect Prediction Approaches

1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Feasibility Evaluation for CPDP

• Solution for negative transfer– Decision tree using project characteristic metrics

(Zimmermann@FSE`09)

• E.g. programming language, # developers, etc.

Follow-up Studies• “An investigation on the feasibility of cross-

project defect prediction.” (He@ASEJ`12)

– Decision tree using distributional characteristics of a dataset E.g. mean, skewness, peakedness, etc.

Feasibility for CPDP

• Challenges on current studies– Decision trees were not evaluated properly.

• Just fitting model

– Low target prediction coverage• 5 out of 34 target projects were feasible for cross-

predictions (He@ASEJ`12)

1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Cross-Prediction Feasibility

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010sLOC

Simple Model

Cyclomatic

MetricHalstea

d Metrics

CK Metrics

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

Personalized Model

Cross-prediction Model• Common challenge

– Current cross-prediction models are limited to datasets with same number of metrics

– Not applicable on projects with different feature spaces (different domains)• NASA Dataset: Halstead, LOC• Apache Dataset: LOC, Cyclomatic, CK metrics

Source Target

1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

CK Metrics

Universal

Process Metrics

Metrics

Cross-Domain

Prediction

History Metrics

Other Metrics

Noise Reduction

Semi-supervised/activePersonalized Model

Survey on Software Defect Prediction

Technology

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