Revisiting ‘revisiting supervised methods for effort-aware cross-project defect prediction’

Effort-aware cross-project defect prediction (EACPDP), which uses cross-project software modules to build a model to rank within-project software modules based on the defect density, has been suggested to allocate limited testing resource efficiently. Recently, Ni et al. proposed an EACPDP method called EASC, which used all cross-project modules to train a model without considering the data distribution difference between cross-project and within-project data. In addition, Ni et al. employed the different defect density calculation strategies when comparing EASC and baseline methods. To explore the effective defect density calculation strategies and methods on EACPDP, the authors compare four data filtering methods and five transfer learning methods with EASC using four commonly used defect density calculation strategies. The authors use three classification evaluation metrics and seven effort-aware metrics to assess the performance of methods on 11 PROMISE datasets comprehensively. The results show that (1) The classification before sorting (CBS+) defect density calculation strategy achieves the best overall performance. (2) Using balanced distribution adaption (BDA) and joint distribution adaptation (JDA) with the K-nearest neighbour classifier to build the EACPDP model can find 15% and 14.3% more defective modules and 11.6% and 8.9% more defects while achieving the acceptable initial false alarms (IFA). (3) Better comprehensive classification performance of the methods can bring better EACPDP performance to some extent. (4) A flexible adjustment of the defect threshold λ of the CBS+ strategy contribute to different goals. In summary, the authors recommend researchers and practitioners use to BDA and JDA with the CBS+ strategy to build the EACPDP model.