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Testing the theory of relative defect proneness for closed-source software

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Abstract

Recent studies on open-source software (OSS) products report that smaller modules are proportionally more defect prone compared to larger ones. This phenomenon, referred to as the Theory of Relative Defect Proneness (RDP), challenges the traditional QA approaches that give a higher priority to larger modules, and it attracts growing interest from closed-source software (CSS) practitioners. In this paper, we report the findings of a study where we tested the theory of RDP using ten CSS products. The results clearly confirm the theory of RDP. We also demonstrate the useful practical implications of this theory in terms of defect-detection effectiveness. Therefore, this study does not only make research contributions by rigorously testing a scientific theory for a different category of software products, but also provides useful insights and evidence to practitioners for revising their existing QA practices.

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Notes

  1. It is worth to note that the conclusions drawn in Koru et al. (2007b, 2008, 2009) were not obtained by correlating or plotting size against defect density (defect count divided by size). Such an approach is problematic and it would result in artificial ratio correlations as demonstrated in Rosenberg (1997), El Emam et al. (2002). Instead, Koru et al. simply examined the functional form of the relationship.

  2. If one wants to show that the Theory of RDP does not hold, the null hypothesis should be stated as “smaller modules are proportionally more defect prone”, and strong statistical evidence should be obtained to reject this null hypothesis safely.

  3. Note that, even though they might look similar, the comparison plots presented in Fig. 4 are different from the concentration curves shown in Fig. 2. In concentration curves, the unique module sizes are identified along the x-axis; whereas, for the comparison plots in Fig. 4, the percentiles of total size are identified along the x-axis where modules are simply sorted from left to right in the increasing order of their size.

  4. Some names are adopted from the 1726 novel of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the creators, contributors, and maintainers of the PROMISE and NASA repositories, especially Tim Menzies and Justin Di Stefano, for the clarifications they made about some of the data sets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, 21250, USA

    Gunes Koru & Dongsong Zhang

  2. Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, 20007, USA

    Hongfang Liu

  3. Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, ON, KL1 8L1, Canada

    Khaled El Emam

Authors
  1. Gunes Koru
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  2. Hongfang Liu
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  3. Dongsong Zhang
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  4. Khaled El Emam
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Correspondence to Gunes Koru.

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Editor: Nachiappan Nagappan

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Koru, G., Liu, H., Zhang, D. et al. Testing the theory of relative defect proneness for closed-source software. Empir Software Eng 15, 577–598 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-010-9132-x

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