Predicting software escalations with maximum ROI

Enterprise software vendors often have to release software products before all reported defects are corrected, and a small number of these reported defects will be escalated by customers whose businesses are seriously impacted. Escalated defects must be quickly resolved at a high cost by the software vendors. The total costs can be even greater, including loss of reputation, satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat revenue. In this paper, we develop an Escalation Prediction (EP) system to mine historic defect report data and predict the escalation risk of current defect reports for maximum ROI (Return On Investment). More specifically, we first describe a simple and general framework to convert the maximum ROI problem to cost-sensitive learning. We then apply and compare several best-known cost-sensitive learning approaches for EP. The EP system has produced promising results, and has been deployed in the product group of an enterprise software vendor. Conclusions drawn from this study also provide guidelines for mining imbalanced datasets and cost-sensitive learning.