Machine Learning Algorithm Evaluate the maintainability

Abstract

Maintainability is an important quality attribute and a difficult concept as it involves a number of measurements. Quality estimation means estimating maintainability of software. Maintainability is a set of attribute that bear on the effort needed to make specified modification. The main goal of this paper is to propose use of few machine learning algorithms with an objective to predict software maintainability and evaluate them. The propose models are Gaussian process regression networks (GPRN), probably approximately correct learning (PAC), Genetic algorithm (GA). This paper predicts the maintenance effort. The QUES (Quality evaluation system) dataset are used in this study. The QUES datasets contains 71 classes. To measure the maintainability, number of “CHANGE” is observed over a period of few years. We can define CHANGE as the number of lines of code which were added, deleted or modified during few year maintenance periods. After this study these machine learning algorithm was compared with few models such as GRNN (General regression neural network) model, RT (Regression tree), MARS (Multiple adaptive regression
 splines), SVM (Support vector machine), MLR (Multiple linear regression) models. Based on experiments, it was
 found that GPRN can be predicting the maintainability more accurately and precisely than prevailing models. We also include object oriented software metric to measure the software maintainability. The use of machine learning algorithms to establish the relationship between metrics and maintainability would be much better approach as these are based on quantity as well as quality.