Effort-aware and just-in-time defect prediction with neural network.

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Abstract

Effort-aware just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction is to rank source code changes based on the likelihood of detects as well as the effort to inspect such changes. Accurate defect prediction algorithms help to find more defects with limited effort. To improve the accuracy of defect prediction, in this paper, we propose a deep learning based approach for effort-aware just-in-time defect prediction. The key idea of the proposed approach is that neural network and deep learning could be exploited to select useful features for defect prediction because they have been proved excellent at selecting useful features for classification and regression. First, we preprocess ten numerical metrics of code changes, and then feed them to a neural network whose output indicates how likely the code change under test contains bugs. Second, we compute the benefit cost ratio for each code change by dividing the likelihood by its size. Finally, we rank code changes according to their benefit cost ratio. Evaluation results on a well-known data set suggest that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on each of the subject projects. It improves the average recall and popt by 15.6% and 8.1%, respectively.