Software Maintainability Prediction Research Articles

Decision Making on a Software Upgrade or Decommission with Data Mining and Machine Learning Techniques in Information Technology Industry

The Organizations have been investing more in Technology and Infrastructure spends like software upgrades, software renewals, software replacements, platform migrations etc., apart from investment in Business, People, and Processes. In this context, it is not an easy task for stakeholders to decide whether to go for a software upgrade or to replace it with another software. There is no unified approach or solution to consolidate data and relationships of Information Technology Assets, Software Upgrades, Software costs, Software defects, Software Performance Metrics, Security issues, IT system versions, service level objectives etc. Due to this, the decision making of software upgrades and software decommissioning is a tedious process and takes more time and effort. There is a need to build a solution that can integrate and validate the information like software assets, software upgrade success and failure likelihoods, cost benefit analysis of Cloud Computing, software metrics for fault prediction, software maintainability prediction results, Digital Transformation readiness and other related factors. There is an opportunity to apply Machine Learning techniques in defining and deriving the success likelihoods on the following data: Systems and data integration, software assets compatibility, operational service level agreement breaches, quality assurance metrics, security issues, number of open defects, number of defect fixes, number of priority incidents, mean time to resolve critical incidents, expected cost increase in software maintenance, potential cost reduction with the software or hardware replacement etc. This Research Proposal outlines the above mentioned to build a recommendation system aka decision tree namely Software Upgrades or Decommissions Life Cycle.

Software Maintainability and Refactorings Prediction Based on Technical Debt Issues

Software maintainability is a crucial factor impacting cost, time and resource allocation for software development. Code refactorings greatly enhance code quality, readability, understandability and extensibility. Hence, accurate prediction methods for both maintainability and refactorings are vital for long-term project sustainability and success, offering substantial benefits to the software community as a whole. This article focuses on prediction of software maintainability and the number of needed code refactorings using technical debt data. Two approaches were explored, one compressing technical debt issues per software component and employing machine learning algorithms such as ExtraTrees, Random Forest, Decision Trees, which all obtained a high accuracy and performance. The second approach retained multiple debt issue entries and utilized a Recurrent Neural Network, although less effectively. In addition to the prediction of the requisite number of code refactorings and software maintainability for individual software components, a comprehensive analysis of technical debt issues was conducted before and after the refactoring process. The outcomes of this study contribute to the advancement of a dependable prediction system for maintainability and refactorings, presenting potential advantages to the software community in effectively managing maintenance resources. Of all the employed models, the ExtraTrees model yielded the most optimal predictive outcomes. To the best of our knowledge no other approaches of using ML techniques for this problem have been reported in the literarture. Keywords and phrases: Software Quality, Sonarqube, Refactoring, Code Smells.

Analysis of Hybridized Techniques with Class Imbalance Learning for Predicting Software Maintainability

Software maintainability is a vital concern of organizations that develop and maintain large software products. The models that assess the maintainability of software systems at initial development stages play a significant role. In the Software Maintainability Prediction (SMP), a prevalent issue that needs to be taken care of is imbalanced data problem. For SMP, imbalanced data problem arises when the software classes that require high maintenance effort are less in number than classes that require low maintenance effort. In this paper, we dealt with the imbalanced data problem by the data resampling. With the imbalanced data, efficient machine learning algorithms are unable to predict the data points of both classes competently. Therefore, we examine the effectiveness of hybridized (HYB) techniques. The HYB techniques aid in finding an optimal solution for a problem by judging the goodness of multiple solutions. As per the results of the study, Adaptive synthetic minority oversampling technique (Adasyn) and Safe level synthetic minority oversampling technique (SafeSMOTE) are the best techniques of imbalanced data. Also, among the investigated HYB techniques, Fuzzy LogitBoost (GFS-LB) and Particle Swarm Optimization with Linear Discriminant Analysis (PSOLDA) emerged as the best techniques to predict maintainability.

A Hyper-parameter Tuning based Novel Model for Prediction of Software Maintainability

Software maintainability is regarded as one of the most important characteristics of any software system. In today's digital world, the expanding significance of software maintenance is motivating the development of efficient software maintainability prediction (SMP) models using statistical and machine learning methods. This study proposes a hyper-parameter optimizable Software Maintainability Prediction (HPOSMP) model using the hybridized approach of data balancing and hyper-parameter optimization of Machine Learning (ML) approach using software maintainability datasets. The training dataset has been created with object-oriented software namely UIMS and QUES. To balance the dataset, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) technology has been adopted. Further, Decision Tree, Gaussian Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest neighbour, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine are adopted as Machine Learning and Statistical Regression Techniques for training of software maintainability dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed HPOSMP model gives better performance as compared to the base SMP models.

A review on soft computing approaches for predicting maintainability of software: State‐of‐the‐art, technical challenges, and future directions

AbstractThe software is changing rapidly with the invention of advanced technologies and methodologies. The ability to rapidly and successfully upgrade software in response to changing business requirements is more vital than ever. For the long‐term management of software products, measuring software maintainability is crucial. The use of soft computing techniques for software maintainability prediction has shown immense promise in software maintenance process by providing accurate prediction of software maintainability. To better understand the role of soft computing techniques for software maintainability prediction, we aim to provide a systematic literature review of soft computing techniques for predicting software maintainability. Firstly, we provide a detailed overview of software maintainability. Following this, we explore the fundamentals of software maintainability and the reasons for adopting soft computing methodologies for predicting software maintainability. Later, we examine the soft computing approaches employed in the process of software maintainability prediction. Furthermore, we discuss the difficulties and potential solutions associated with the use of soft computing techniques in predicting maintainability of software. Finally, we conclude the review with some promising future directions to drive further research innovations and developments in this promising area. This systematic literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the soft computing strategies utilized for software maintainability for future researchers.

Improvement in Software Maintainability Prediction Using Data Balancing and Machine Learning

Improvement in Software Maintainability Prediction Using Data Balancing and Machine Learning

A multiple criteria decision analysis based approach to remove uncertainty in SMP models

Software has to be updated frequently to match the customer needs. If software maintainability is not given priority, it affects the software development life cycle and maintenance expenses, which deplete organizational assets. Before releasing software, maintainability must be estimated, as the impact of bugs and errors can affect the cost and reputation of the organization after deployment. Regardless of the programming paradigm, it’s important to assess software maintainability. Many software maintainability prediction models’ compatibilities with new programming paradigms are criticized because their limited applicability over heterogeneous datasets. Due this challenge small and medium-sized organizations may even skip the maintainability assessment, resulting in huge lose to such organizations. Motivated by this fact, we used Genetic Algorithm optimized Random Forest technique (GA) for software maintainability prediction models over heterogeneous datasets. To find optimal model for software maintainability prediction, the Technique for Order preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), a popular multiple-criteria decision-making model, is adopted. From the results, it is concluded that the GA is optimal for predicting maintainability of software developed in various paradigms.

Recommendation of Regression Techniques for Software Maintainability Prediction With Multi-Criteria Decision-Making

Context: Successful project management requires accurate estimation of maintenance effort and cost. Software Maintainability Prediction (SMP) plays a very important role in controlling software maintenance costs by detecting software modules with low maintainability. In previous research, numerous regression techniques were applied to predict software maintainability. The results with respect to various accuracy or performance measures are conflicting. Thus, there is a dire need to develop a method that can recommend regression techniques for predicting software maintainability in the presence of conflicting performance or accuracy measures. Objective: This paper aims to recommend suitable regression techniques for SMP based on the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach. Methodology: In our proposed approach, selecting a regression technique for SMP is modeled as the MCDM problem. To validate the proposed approach, an empirical study is done using three MCDM methods, 22 regression techniques, and eight performance measures over five software maintainability datasets. Before applying MCDM methods, a statistical test, namely the Friedman test, was conducted to ensure the significant difference between regression techniques. Results: The results of our study show that SVR, IBK, REPTree, and MLP-SVM achieve the highest-ranking score value one and are recommended as top-ranked approaches for SMP based on MCDM rankings. Conclusion: The main outcome of this study is that the proposed MCDM-based approach can be used as an efficient tool for selecting regression techniques among different available regression techniques for SMP modeling in the presence of more than one conflicting accuracy or performance measure.

Enhanced convolutional neural network based android software maintainability prediction

Advancement in mobile technology, necessitates quality in development of android applications. To improve the quality of android application, evaluation of its maintenance has to be started from the initial stage of development. There are several existing models involved in android application maintenance evaluation, but most of them suffers from the class imbalance problem and its performance depends on the size of the dataset. This paper focuses on overcoming the class imbalance while using convolutional neural network for prediction the android application maintainability. In this work both android metrics and object-oriented metrics are used for evaluating the android application maintainability. The standard convolutional neural network is enhanced by pretraining it using evolutionary algorithm known as moth flame optimization (MFO). The MFO involves in optimizing the learning parameters of convolutional layer and after the training process is completed, with the acquired knowledge it handles the small size dataset very effectively during the testing phase. Thus, the simulation results of maintainability prediction in android application development using proposed enhanced CNN achieves better result while comparing with other standard classification models.

Software Quality Prediction Using Machine Learning

With the emergence of Machine Learning, many companies are increasingly embracing this revolutionary approach, both in terms of growth and maintenance, to reduce software costs. This research aimed at building two models which is Software Defect Prediction Model (SDPM) which will be used to predict defects in software and Software Maintainability Prediction Model (SMPM) which will be used for Software Maintainability. Different classifiers, namely Random Forest, Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes and Artificial Neural Networks have been considered and then evaluated using different metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall and Area Under the Curve (AUC). The two models have successfully been evaluated and Decision Tree has been chosen as compared to other classifiers which tends to perform much better. Finally a framework based on a set of guidelines that can be used to improve software quality has been devised.

A feature selection strategy for improving software maintainability prediction

Software maintainability is a significant contributor while choosing particular software. It is helpful in estimation of the efforts required after delivering the software to the customer. However, issues like imbalanced distribution of datasets, and redundant and irrelevant occurrence of various features degrade the performance of maintainability prediction models. Therefore, current study applies ImpS algorithm to handle imbalanced data and extensively investigates several Feature Selection (FS) techniques including Symmetrical Uncertainty (SU), RandomForest filter, and Correlation-based FS using one open-source, three proprietaries and two commercial datasets. Eight different machine learning algorithms are utilized for developing prediction models. The performance of models is evaluated using Accuracy, G-Mean, Balance, & Area under the ROC Curve. Two statistical tests, Friedman Test and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test are conducted for assessing different FS techniques. The results substantiate that FS techniques significantly improve the performance of various prediction models with an overall improvement of 18.58%, 129.73%, 80.00%, and 45.76% in the median values of Accuracy, G-Mean, Balance, & AUC, respectively for all the datasets taken together. Friedman test advocates the supremacy of SU FS technique. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test showcases that SU FS technique is significantly superior to the CFS technique for three out of six datasets.

Handling class imbalance problem in software maintainability prediction: an empirical investigation

Handling class imbalance problem in software maintainability prediction: an empirical investigation

Firefly-Based Maintainability Prediction for Enhancing Quality of Software

In a broad spectrum, software metrics play a vital role in attribute assessment, which successively moves software projects. The metrics measure gives many crucial facets of the system, enhancing the system quality of software developed. Moreover, maintenance is the correction process that works out in the software system once the software is initially made. The noteworthy characteristic of any software is ‘change,’ and as a result, additional concern ought to be taken in developing software. So, the software is expected to be modified effortlessly (maintainable). Predicting software maintainability is still challenging, and accurate prediction models with low error rates are required. Since there are so many modern programming languages on the horizon. To accurately measure software maintainability, new techniques have to been introduced. This paper proposes a maintainability index (MI) by considering various software metrics by which the error gets minimized. It also intends to adopt a renowned optimization algorithm, namely Firefly (FF), for the optimum result. The proposed Base Model-FF is compared to other traditional models like BM-Differential Evolution (BM-DE), BM-Artificial Bee Colony (BM-ABC), BM-Particle Swarm Optimization (BM-PSO), and BM-Genetic Algorithm (BM- GA) in terms of performance metrics like Differential ratio, correlation coefficient, and Random Mean Square Error (RMSE).

An Extensive Analysis of Machine Learning Based Boosting Algorithms for Software Maintainability Prediction

An Extensive Analysis of Machine Learning Based Boosting Algorithms for Software Maintainability Prediction

Machine Learning Techniques for Software Maintainability Prediction: Accuracy Analysis

Maintaining software once implemented on the end-user side is laborious and, over its lifetime, is most often considerably more expensive than the initial software development. The prediction of software maintainability has emerged as an important research topic to address industry expectations for reducing costs, in particular, maintenance costs. Researchers and practitioners have been working on proposing and identifying a variety of techniques ranging from statistical to machine learning (ML) for better prediction of software maintainability. This review has been carried out to analyze the empirical evidence on the accuracy of software product maintainability prediction (SPMP) using ML techniques. This paper analyzes and discusses the findings of 77 selected studies published from 2000 to 2018 according to the following criteria: maintainability prediction techniques, validation methods, accuracy criteria, overall accuracy of ML techniques, and the techniques offering the best performance. The review process followed the well-known systematic review process. The results show that ML techniques are frequently used in predicting maintainability. In particular, artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine/regression (SVM/R), regression & decision trees (DT), and fuzzy & neuro fuzzy (FNF) techniques are more accurate in terms of PRED and MMRE. The N-fold and leave-one-out cross-validation methods, and the MMRE and PRED accuracy criteria are frequently used in empirical studies. In general, ML techniques outperformed non-machine learning techniques, e.g., regression analysis (RA) techniques, while FNF outperformed SVM/R, DT, and ANN in most experiments. However, while many techniques were reported superior, no specific one can be identified as the best.

An empirical study on predictability of software maintainability using imbalanced data

In software engineering predictive modeling, early prediction of software modules or classes that possess high maintainability effort is a challenging task. Many prediction models are constructed to predict the maintainability of software classes or modules by applying various machine learning (ML) techniques. If the software modules or classes need high maintainability, effort would be reduced in a dataset, and there would be imbalanced data to train the model. The imbalanced datasets make ML techniques bias their predictions towards low maintainability effort or majority classes, and minority class instances get discarded as noise by the machine learning (ML) techniques. In this direction, this paper presents empirical work to improve the performance of software maintainability prediction (SMP) models developed with ML techniques using imbalanced data. For developing the models, the imbalanced data is pre-processed by applying data resampling methods. Fourteen data resampling methods, including oversampling, undersampling, and hybrid resampling, are used in the study. The study results recommend that the safe-level synthetic minority oversampling technique (Safe-Level-SMOTE) is a useful method to deal with the imbalanced datasets and to develop competent prediction models to forecast software maintainability.

Software maintainability prediction of open source datasets using least squares support vector machines

Software Maintainability (SM), being one of the priciest and tedious phases of any software development life cycle, has drawn the attention of various researchers over the years. SM measures the ease of carrying out maintenance activities such as repair and improvement of software code as per the changing needs of the customer and should be predicted well in advance. The current study implements the Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVM) algorithm for SM Prediction (SMP) on six open source datasets, namely Abdera, Ivy, jEdit, Log4j, Poi, and Rave. MAE, RMSE, and MMRE are considered as the prediction accuracy measures to evaluate the performance. Results indicate that LS-SVM is a potentially viable tool for predicting maintainability. Best results are obtained with jEdit dataset having minimum values for MAE, RMSE, and MMRE, i.e. 20.38, 46.97, and 1.02, respectively; jEdit having high component stability with lesser number of changes.

Impact of Historical Software Metric Changes in Predicting Future Maintainability Trends in Open-Source Software Development

Software maintenance is one of the key stages in the software lifecycle and it includes a variety of activities that consume the significant portion of the costs of a software project. Previous research suggest that future software maintainability can be predicted, based on various source code aspects, but most of the research focuses on the prediction based on the present state of the code and ignores its history. While taking the history into account in software maintainability prediction seems intuitive, the research empirically testing this has not been done, and is the main goal of this paper. This paper empirically evaluates the contribution of historical measurements of the Chidamber & Kemerer (C&K) software metrics to software maintainability prediction models. The main contribution of the paper is the building of the prediction models with classification and regression trees and random forest learners in iterations by adding historical measurement data extracted from previous releases gradually. The maintainability prediction models were built based on software metric measurements obtained from real-world open-source software projects. The analysis of the results show that an additional amount of historical metric measurements contributes to the maintainability prediction. Additionally, the study evaluates the contribution of individual C&K software metrics on the performance of maintainability prediction models.

A systematic literature review on empirical studies towards prediction of software maintainability

Software maintainability prediction in the earlier stages of software development involves the construction of models for the accurate estimation of maintenance effort. This guides the software practitioners to manage the resources optimally. This study aims at systematically reviewing the prediction models from January 1990 to October 2019 for predicting software maintainability. We analyze the effectiveness of these models according to various aspects. To meet the goal of the research, we have identified 36 research papers. On investigating these papers, we found that various machine learning (ML), statistical (ST), and hybridized (HB) techniques have been applied to develop prediction models to predict software maintainability. The significant finding of this review is that the overall performance of ML-based models is better than that of ST models. The use of HB techniques for prediction of software maintainability is limited. The results of this review revealed that software maintainability prediction (SMP) models developed using ML techniques outperformed models developed using ST techniques. Also, the prediction performance of few models developed using HB techniques is encouraging, yet no conclusive results about the performance of HB techniques could be reported because different HB techniques are applied in a few studies.

Using Ensembles for Class-Imbalance Problem to Predict Maintainability of Open Source Software

To facilitate software maintenance and save the maintenance cost, numerous machine learning (ML) techniques have been studied to predict the maintainability of software modules or classes. An abundant amount of effort has been put by the research community to develop software maintainability prediction (SMP) models by relating software metrics to the maintainability of modules or classes. When software classes demanding the high maintainability effort (HME) are less as compared to the low maintainability effort (LME) classes, the situation leads to imbalanced datasets for training the SMP models. The imbalanced class distribution in SMP datasets could be a dilemma for various ML techniques because, in the case of an imbalanced dataset, minority class instances are either misclassified by the ML techniques or get discarded as noise. The recent development in predictive modeling has ascertained that ensemble techniques can boost the performance of ML techniques by collating their predictions. Ensembles themselves do not solve the class-imbalance problem much. However, aggregation of ensemble techniques with the certain techniques to handle class-imbalance problem (e.g., data resampling) has led to several proposals in research. This paper evaluates the performance of ensembles for the class-imbalance in the domain of SMP. The ensembles for class-imbalance problem (ECIP) are the modification of ensembles which pre-process the imbalanced data using data resampling before the learning process. This study experimentally compares the performance of several ECIP using performance metrics Balance and g-Mean over eight Apache software datasets. The results of the study advocate that for imbalanced datasets, ECIP improves the performance of SMP models as compared to classic ensembles.