Within-company Data Research Articles

Defect prediction model of static code features for cross-company and cross-project software

Software project metrics are seen needless in software industries but they are useful when some unacceptable situations come in the project (Satapathy et al., Proceedings of the 48th annual convention of CSI, vol 2, 2013). Mainly the focus of various defect prediction studies is to build prediction models using the regional data available within the company. So companies maintain a data repository where data of their past projects can be stored which can be used for defect prediction in the future. However, many companies do not follow this practice. In software engineering, the crucial task is Defect prediction. In this paper, a binary defect prediction model was built and examined if there is any conclusion or not. This paper presents the assets of cross-company and within-company data against software defect prediction. Neural network approach has been used to prepare the model for defect prediction. Further, this paper compares the results of with-in and cross-company defect prediction models. To analyse the results for with-in company two versions of Firefox (i.e. 2.0 and 3.0) were considered; for cross project one version of Mozila Sea Monkey (1.0.1); for cross-company validation one version of LICQ were considered. Main focus of the study is to analyse the behavior or role of software metrics for acceptable level of defect prediction.

Social media technology use and salesperson performance: A two study examination of the role of salesperson behaviors, characteristics, and training

Extending the literature on sales technology, we use two studies to develop and test a model involving salesperson-customer shared technology tools, referred to as Social Media Technology (SMT). Specifically, we demonstrate the impacts of SMT in B2B sales contexts on customer relationship performance and objective sales performance through key mediating behaviors and characteristics. Empirical findings from two studies, cross-company and within-company data, demonstrate the effects of SMT on salesperson product information communication, diligence, product knowledge, and adaptability. Moderating effects suggest that the integration of SMT in the absence of training on the technology may not yield the best results. Findings suggest that firms must allocate the resources necessary to properly implement SMT strategies. The framework tested provides a foundation for integration of SMT into buyer-seller interactions.

Cross-company defect prediction via semi-supervised clustering-based data filtering and MSTrA-based transfer learning

Cross-company defect prediction (CCDP) is a practical way that trains a prediction model by exploiting one or multiple projects of a source company and then applies the model to a target company. Unfortunately, larger irrelevant cross-company (CC) data usually make it difficult to build a prediction model with high performance. On the other hand, brute force leveraging of CC data poorly related to within-company data may decrease the prediction model performance. To address such issues, we aim to provide an effective solution for CCDP. First, we propose a novel semi-supervised clustering-based data filtering method (i.e., SSDBSCAN filter) to filter out irrelevant CC data. Second, based on the filtered CC data, we for the first time introduce multi-source TrAdaBoost algorithm, an effective transfer learning method, into CCDP to import knowledge not from one but from multiple sources to avoid negative transfer. Experiments on 15 public datasets indicate that: (1) our proposed SSDBSCAN filter achieves better overall performance than compared data filtering methods; (2) our proposed CCDP approach achieves the best overall performance among all tested CCDP approaches; and (3) our proposed CCDP approach performs significantly better than with-company defect prediction models.

Negative samples reduction in cross-company software defects prediction

ContextSoftware defect prediction has been widely studied based on various machine-learning algorithms. Previous studies usually focus on within-company defects prediction (WCDP), but lack of training data in the early stages of software testing limits the efficiency of WCDP in practice. Thus, recent research has largely examined the cross-company defects prediction (CCDP) as an alternative solution. ObjectiveHowever, the gap of different distributions between cross-company (CC) data and within-company (WC) data usually makes it difficult to build a high-quality CCDP model. In this paper, a novel algorithm named Double Transfer Boosting (DTB) is introduced to narrow this gap and improve the performance of CCDP by reducing negative samples in CC data. MethodThe proposed DTB model integrates two levels of data transfer: first, the data gravitation method reshapes the whole distribution of CC data to fit WC data. Second, the transfer boosting method employs a small ratio of labeled WC data to eliminate negative instances in CC data. ResultsThe empirical evaluation was conducted based on 15 publicly available datasets. CCDP experiment results indicated that the proposed model achieved better overall performance than compared CCDP models. DTB was also compared to WCDP in two different situations. Statistical analysis suggested that DTB performed significantly better than WCDP models trained by limited samples and produced comparable results to WCDP with sufficient training data. ConclusionsDTB reforms the distribution of CC data from different levels to improve the performance of CCDP, and experimental results and analysis demonstrate that it could be an effective model for early software defects detection.

Transfer learning for cross-company software defect prediction

Context Software defect prediction studies usually built models using within-company data, but very few focused on the prediction models trained with cross-company data. It is difficult to employ these models which are built on the within-company data in practice, because of the lack of these local data repositories. Recently, transfer learning has attracted more and more attention for building classifier in target domain using the data from related source domain. It is very useful in cases when distributions of training and test instances differ, but is it appropriate for cross-company software defect prediction? Objective In this paper, we consider the cross-company defect prediction scenario where source and target data are drawn from different companies. In order to harness cross company data, we try to exploit the transfer learning method to build faster and highly effective prediction model. Method Unlike the prior works selecting training data which are similar from the test data, we proposed a novel algorithm called Transfer Naive Bayes (TNB), by using the information of all the proper features in training data. Our solution estimates the distribution of the test data, and transfers cross-company data information into the weights of the training data. On these weighted data, the defect prediction model is built. Results This article presents a theoretical analysis for the comparative methods, and shows the experiment results on the data sets from different organizations. It indicates that TNB is more accurate in terms of AUC (The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve), within less runtime than the state of the art methods. Conclusion It is concluded that when there are too few local training data to train good classifiers, the useful knowledge from different-distribution training data on feature level may help. We are optimistic that our transfer learning method can guide optimal resource allocation strategies, which may reduce software testing cost and increase effectiveness of software testing process.

On the relative value of cross-company and within-company data for defect prediction

We propose a practical defect prediction approach for companies that do not track defect related data. Specifically, we investigate the applicability of cross-company (CC) data for building localized defect predictors using static code features. Firstly, we analyze the conditions, where CC data can be used as is. These conditions turn out to be quite few. Then we apply principles of analogy-based learning (i.e. nearest neighbor (NN) filtering) to CC data, in order to fine tune these models for localization. We compare the performance of these models with that of defect predictors learned from within-company (WC) data. As expected, we observe that defect predictors learned from WC data outperform the ones learned from CC data. However, our analyses also yield defect predictors learned from NN-filtered CC data, with performance close to, but still not better than, WC data. Therefore, we perform a final analysis for determining the minimum number of local defect reports in order to learn WC defect predictors. We demonstrate in this paper that the minimum number of data samples required to build effective defect predictors can be quite small and can be collected quickly within a few months. Hence, for companies with no local defect data, we recommend a two-phase approach that allows them to employ the defect prediction process instantaneously. In phase one, companies should use NN-filtered CC data to initiate the defect prediction process and simultaneously start collecting WC (local) data. Once enough WC data is collected (i.e. after a few months), organizations should switch to phase two and use predictors learned from WC data.

Cross versus Within-Company Cost Estimation Studies: A Systematic Review

The objective of this paper is to determine under what circumstances individual organizations would be able to rely on cross-company-based estimation models. We performed a systematic review of studies that compared predictions from cross-company models with predictions from within-company models based on analysis of project data. Ten papers compared cross-company and within-company estimation models; however, only seven presented independent results. Of those seven, three found that cross-company models were not significantly different from within-company models, and four found that cross-company models were significantly worse than within-company models. Experimental procedures used by the studies differed making it impossible to undertake formal meta-analysis of the results. The main trend distinguishing study results was that studies with small within-company data sets (i.e., $20 projects) that used leave-one-out cross validation all found that the within-company model was significantly different (better) from the cross-company model. The results of this review are inconclusive. It is clear that some organizations would be ill-served by cross-company models whereas others would benefit. Further studies are needed, but they must be independent (i.e., based on different data bases or at least different single company data sets) and should address specific hypotheses concerning the conditions that would favor cross-company or within-company models. In addition, experimenters need to standardize their experimental procedures to enable formal meta-analysis, and recommendations are made in Section 3.