Investigation of relationship between object-oriented metrics and change proneness

Software is the heartbeat of modern day technology. In order to keep up with the pace of modern day expansion, change in any software is inevitable. Defects and enhancements are the two main reasons for a software change. The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between object oriented metrics and change proneness. Software prediction models based on these results can help us identify change prone classes of a software which would lead to more rigorous testing and better results. In the previous research, the use of machine learning methods for predicting faulty classes was found. However till date no study determines the effectiveness of machine learning methods for predicting change prone classes. Statistical and machine learning methods are two different techniques for software quality prediction. We evaluate and compare the performance of these machine learning methods with statistical method (logistic regression). The results are based on three chosen open source software, written in java language. The performance of the predicted models was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic analysis. The study shows that machine learning methods are comparable to regression techniques. Testing based on change proneness of a software leads to better quality by targeting the most change prone classes. Thus, the developed models can be used to reduce the probability of defect occurrence and we commit ourselves to better maintenance.