COMET: A conceptual coupling based metrics suite for software defect prediction

Abstract

Abstract Identifying defective software components is an essential activity during software development which contributes to continuously improving the software quality. Since relatively numerous defects are due to violated software dependencies, coupling metrics could increase the performance of software defect prediction. Among various measures expressing the coupling between software components, the conceptual coupling metrics capture similarities based on the semantic information contained in the source code. We are introducing a new conceptual coupling based metric suite, named COMET, for software defect prediction. Experiments conducted on publicly available data sets, using both unsupervised and supervised learning models, emphasize that COMET metrics suite is superior to the software metrics widely used in the defect prediction literature.