Automatic Detection of Software Defects based on Machine Learning

Abstract

Defects in software are one of the critical problems in software engineering community because they provide inaccurate results and negatively affect the quality and reliability of the software. These defects must be detected in the early stages of software development. Researchers had used Software Defect Detection (SDD) techniques to allow predicting module faultproneness. By implementing the hyperparameter optimization techniques and exploiting data imbalances in predicting defects, this paper proposes and develops an SDD model with high performance and generalization capability. To classify defects in software modules, machine learning algorithms and ensemble learning techniques are used on the balanced datasets. The balanced datasets are obtained through using a hybrid of synthetic minority oversample (SMOTE) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). To obtain the optimal hyperparameters needed for the used classifiers and for the dataset balanced algorithms, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NDSGA-II) is used. To reduce the time and save other used resources, Hyperband technique, which is a multi-fidelity optimization, is used in NDSGA-II. A 10-fold Cross Validation (CV) is applied to overcome the overfitting and underfitting problems. The accuracy, recall, F-measure, and ROC AUC metrics are used to evaluate the SDD model. The results show that the proposed model predicts defects more accurately than the compared studies.