Empirical evaluation of defect projection models for widely-deployed production software systems

Defect-occurrence projection is necessary for the development of methods to mitigate the risks of software defect occurrences. In this paper, we examine user-reported software defectoccurrence patterns across twenty-two releases of four widelydeployed, business-critical, production, software systems: a commercial operating system, a commercial middleware system, an open source operating system (OpenBSD), and an open source middleware system (Tomcat). We evaluate the suitability of common defect-occurrence models by first assessing the match between characteristics of widely-deployed production software systems and model structures. We then evaluate how well the models fit real world data. We find that the Weibull model is flexible enough to capture defect-occurrence behavior across a wide range of systems. It provides the best model fit in 16 out of the 22 releases. We then evaluate the ability of the moving averages and the exponential smoothing methods to extrapolate Weibull model p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Paul Luo Li, Mary Shaw, James D. Herbsleb, Bonnie K. Ray, Peter Santhanam
• Keywords: Fitted Model Parameters, Open Source Software, SIGSOFT 2004, Software Engineering, Weibull Model Parameters