Software Defect Prediction Using Call Graph Based Ranking (CGBR) Framework

Abstract

Recent research on static code attribute (SCA) based defect prediction suggests that a performance ceiling has been achieved and this barrier can be exceeded by increasing the information content in data. In this research we propose static call graph based ranking (CGBR) framework, which can be applied to any defect prediction model based on SCA. In this framework, we model both intra module properties and inter module relations. Our results show that defect predictors using CGBR framework can detect the same number of defective modules, while yielding significantly lower false alarm rates. On industrial public data, we also show that using CGBR framework can improve testing efforts by 23%.