The effectiveness of software metrics in identifying error-prone classes in post-release software evolution process

Many empirical studies have found that software metrics can predict class error proneness and the prediction can be used to accurately group error-prone classes. Recent empirical studies have used open source systems. These studies, however, focused on the relationship between software metrics and class error proneness during the development phase of software projects. Whether software metrics can still predict class error proneness in a system’s post-release evolution is still a question to be answered. This study examined three releases of the Eclipse project and found that although some metrics can still predict class error proneness in three error-severity categories, the accuracy of the prediction decreased from release to release. Furthermore, we found that the prediction cannot be used to build a metrics model to identify error-prone classes with acceptable accuracy. These findings suggest that as a system evolves, the use of some commonly used metrics to identify which classes are more prone to errors becomes increasingly difficult and we should seek alternative methods (to the metric-prediction models) to locate error-prone classes if we want high accuracy.