BugCache for Inspections : Hit or Miss?

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rahman, F.
  • Posnett, D.
  • Hindle, Abram
  • Barr, E.
  • Devanbu, P.

• Inspection is a highly effective but costly technique for quality control. Most companies do not have the resources to inspect all the code; thus accurate defect prediction can help focus available inspection resources. BugCache is a simple, elegant, award-winning prediction scheme that "caches" files that are likely to contain defects [12]. In this paper, we evaluate the utility of BugCache as a tool for focusing inspection, we examine the assumptions underlying BugCache with the aim of improving it, and finally we compare it with a simple, standard bug-prediction technique. We find that BugCache is, in fact, useful for focusing inspection effort; but surprisingly, we find that its performance, when used for inspections, is not much better than a naive prediction model -- viz., a model that orders files in the system by their count of closed bugs and chooses enough files to capture 20% of the lines in the system.

• Date created

  2011

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Fault Prediction
  • Inspection

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Presentation

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-pcxm-gb69

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International