English

Feature Sets in Just-in-Time Defect Prediction: An Empirical Evaluation

Software Engineering 2022-09-29 v1

Abstract

Just-in-time defect prediction assigns a defect risk to each new change to a software repository in order to prioritize review and testing efforts. Over the last decades different approaches were proposed in literature to craft more accurate prediction models. However, defect prediction is still not widely used in industry, due to predictions with varying performance. In this study, we evaluate existing features on six open-source projects and propose two new features sets, not yet discussed in literature. By combining all feature sets, we improve MCC by on average 21%, leading to the best performing models when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We also evaluate effort-awareness and find that on average 14% more defects can be identified, inspecting 20% of changed lines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.13978,
  title  = {Feature Sets in Just-in-Time Defect Prediction: An Empirical Evaluation},
  author = {Peter Bludau and Alexander Pretschner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.13978},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, accepted at the 18th edition of the International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering (PROMISE'22)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:16:20.759Z