Software fault prediction: A literature review and current trends

Abstract

Software engineering discipline contains several prediction approaches such as test effort prediction, correction cost prediction, fault prediction, reusability prediction, security prediction, effort prediction, and quality prediction. However, most of these prediction approaches are still in preliminary phase and more research should be conducted to reach robust models. Software fault prediction is the most popular research area in these prediction approaches and recently several research centers started new projects on this area. In this study, we investigated 90 software fault prediction papers published between year 1990 and year 2009 and then we categorized these papers according to the publication year. This paper surveys the software engineering literature on software fault prediction and both machine learning based and statistical based approaches are included in this survey. Papers explained in this article reflect the outline of what was published so far, but naturally this is not a complete review of all the papers published so far. This paper will help researchers to investigate the previous studies from metrics, methods, datasets, performance evaluation metrics, and experimental results perspectives in an easy and effective manner. Furthermore, current trends are introduced and discussed.