Software Defect Prediction Using Transitive Dependencies on Software Dependency Graph

Abstract

In software production process, quality assurance resources are limited by time and cost. In order to achieve high quality, managers need to detect the defect prone parts of code and allocate the resources to them. So far, researchers have used some methods such as complexity metrics, design metrics and network measures for software defect prediction. Although these methods are somewhat efficient, still there isn’t a global method for it. In this paper we have presented two new definitions which are dependency tree and circular dependency. Dependency tree covers all of the direct and indirect dependencies circular dependency evaluates all of the cyclic chains of dependency for each component. What has been differed our work from the previous related works is that we have presented that using transitive dependencies is efficient in defect prediction.