1Survey on Software Defect Prediction

Software defect prediction is one of the most active research areas in software engineering. Defect prediction results provide the list of defect-prone source code artifacts so that quality assurance teams can effectively allocate limited resources for validating software products by putting more effort on the defect-prone source code. As the size of software projects becomes larger, defect prediction techniques will play an important role to support developers as well as to speed up time to market with more reliable software products. In this survey, we first introduce the common defect prediction process used in the literature and how to evaluate defect prediction performance. Second, we compare different defect prediction techniques such as metrics, models, and algorithms. Third, we discuss various approaches for cross-project defect prediction that is an actively studied topic in recent years. We then discuss applications on defect prediction and other emerging topics. Finally, based on this survey, we identify challenging issues for the next step of the software defect prediction. I