A hybrid heuristic approach to optimize rule-based software quality estimation models

Software quality is defined as the degree to which a software component or system meets specified requirements and specifications. Assessing software quality in the early stages of design and development is crucial as it helps reduce effort, time and money. However, the task is difficult since most software quality characteristics (such as maintainability, reliability and reusability) cannot be directly and objectively measured before the software product is deployed and used for a certain period of time. Nonetheless, these software quality characteristics can be predicted from other measurable software quality attributes such as complexity and inheritance. Many metrics have been proposed for this purpose. In this context, we speak of estimating software quality characteristics from measurable attributes. For this purpose, software quality estimation models have been widely used. These take different forms: statistical models, rule-based models and decision trees. However, data used to build such models is scarce in the domain of software quality. As a result, the accuracy of the built estimation models deteriorates when they are used to predict the quality of new software components. In this paper, we propose a search-based software engineering approach to improve the prediction accuracy of software quality estimation models by adapting them to new unseen software products. The method has been implemented and favorable result comparisons are reported in this work. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.