INTEGRATING ACTION-BASED DEFECT PREDICTION TO PROVIDE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEFECT ACTION CORRECTION

Abstract

Reducing software defects is an essential activity for Software Process Improvement. The Action-Based Defect Prediction (ABDP) approach fragments the software process into actions, and builds software defect prediction models using data collected from the execution of actions and reported defects. Though the ABDP approach can be applied to predict possible defects in subsequent actions, the efficiency of corrections is dependent on the skill and knowledge of the stakeholders. To address this problem, this study proposes the Action Correction Recommendation (ACR) model to provide recommendations for action correction, using the Negative Association Rule mining technique. In addition to applying the association rule mining technique to build a High Defect Prediction Model (HDPM) to identify high defect action, the ACR builds a Low Defect Prediction Model (LDPM). For a submitted action, each HDPM rule used to predict the action as a high defect action and the LDPM rules are analyzed using negative association rule mining to spot the rule items with different characteristics in HDPM and LDPM rules. This information not only identifies the attributes required for corrections, but also provides a range (or a value) to facilitate the high defect action corrections. This study applies the ACR approach to a business software project to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results show that the recommendations obtained can be applied to decrease software defect removal efforts.