A Systematic Literature Review on Fault Prediction Performance in Software Engineering

The accurate prediction of where faults are likely to occur in code can help direct test effort, reduce costs, and improve the quality of software.

We investigate how the context of models, the independent variables used, and the modeling techniques applied influence the performance of fault prediction models. Method: We used a systematic literature review to identify 208 fault prediction studies published from January 2000 to December 2010. We synthesize the quantitative and qualitative results of 36 studies which report sufficient contextual and methodological information according to the criteria we develop and apply.