Estimation of Target Defect Prediction Coverage in Heterogeneous Cross Software Projects

Heterogeneous cross-project defect prediction (HCPDP) is an evolving area under quality assurance domain which aims to predict defects in a target project that has restricted historical defect data as well as completely non-uniform software metrics from other projects using a model built on another source project. The article discusses a particular source project group's problem of defect prediction coverage (DPC) and also proposes a novel two phase model for addressing this issue in HCPDP. The study has evaluated DPC on 13 benchmarked datasets in three open source software projects. One hundred percent of DPC is achieved with higher defect prediction accuracy for two project group pairs. The issue of partial DPC is found in third prediction pairs and a new strategy is proposed in the research study to overcome this issue. Furthermore, this paper compares HCPDP modeling with reference to with-in project defect prediction (WPDP), both empirically and theoretically, and it is found that the performance of WPDP is highly comparable to HCPDP and gradient boosting method performs best among all three classifiers.