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Ordering Fault-Prone Software Modules

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Abstract

Software developers apply various techniques early in development to improve software reliability, such as extra reviews, additional testing, and strategic assignment of personnel. Due to limited resources and time, it is often not practical to enhance the reliability of all modules. Our goal is to target reliability enhancement activities to those modules that would otherwise have problems later. Prior research has shown that a software quality model based on software product and process metrics can predict which modules are likely to have faults.

A module-order model is a quantitative software quality model that is used to predict the rank-order of modules according to a quality factor, such as the number of faults. The contribution of this paper is definition of module-order models and a method for their evaluation and use. Two empirical case studies of full-scale industrial software systems provide empirical evidence of the usefulness of module-order models for targeting reliability enhancement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, USA

    Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mississippi State University, USA

    Edward B. Allen

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  1. Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar
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  2. Edward B. Allen
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Khoshgoftaar, T.M., Allen, E.B. Ordering Fault-Prone Software Modules. Software Quality Journal 11, 19–37 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023632027907

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