A Framework based on Deep Neural Network for Ranking-oriented Software Defect Prediction

Software systems are getting larger and more complex than ever before. In order to improve software reliability, software defect prediction is applied to assist developers in bug discovery. The ranking-oriented software defect prediction aims to rank software modules according to the predicted defect counts. However, existing ranking-oriented defect prediction models are constructed based on traditional hand-crafted features, which might overlook the rich syntactic information buried inside the source codes. In this paper, we propose a universal deep learning-based framework called United Deep Network for ranking-oriented software defect prediction. This framework utilizes deep neural networks to automatically generate features from source code with the syntactic and structural information preserved, and it can combine extracted features with traditional hand-crafted features in order to take advantage of both kinds of features to construct prediction models. Experimental results over 29 sets of data show the good performance of the proposed framework for building ranking-oriented defect prediction models.