Resource oriented selection of rule-based classification models: An empirical case study

The amount of resources allocated for software quality improvements is often not enough to achieve the desired software quality. Software quality classification models that yield a risk-based quality estimation of program modules, such as fault-prone (fp) and not fault-prone (nfp), are useful as software quality assurance techniques. Their usefulness is largely dependent on whether enough resources are available for inspecting the fp modules. Since a given development project has its own budget and time limitations, a resource-based software quality improvement seems more appropriate for achieving its quality goals. A classification model should provide quality improvement guidance so as to maximize resource-utilization. We present a procedure for building software quality classification models from the limited resources perspective. The essence of the procedure is the use of our recently proposed Modified Expected Cost of Misclassification (MECM) measure for developing resource-oriented software quality classification models. The measure penalizes a model, in terms of costs of misclassifications, if the model predicts more number of fp modules than the number that can be inspected with the allotted resources. Our analysis is presented in the context of our Rule-Based Classification Modeling (RBCM) technique. An empirical case study of a large-scale software system demonstrates the promising results of using the MECM measure to select an appropriate resource-based rule-based classification model. Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar is a professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University and the Director of the graduate programs and research. His research interests are in software engineering, software metrics, software reliability and quality engineering, computational intelligence applications, computer security, computer performance evaluation, data mining, machine learning, statistical modeling, and intelligent data analysis. He has published more than 300 refereed papers in these areas. He is a member of the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Reliability Society. He was the general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence 2005. Naeem Seliya is an Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. He recieved his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA in 2005. His research interests include software engineering, data mining and machine learnring, application and data security, bioinformatics and computational intelligence. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.