Mining the impact of object oriented metrics for change prediction using Machine Learning and Search-based techniques

Change in a software is crucial to incorporate defect correction and continuous evolution of requirements and technology. Thus, development of quality models to predict the change proneness attribute of a software is important to effectively utilize and plan the finite resources during maintenance and testing phase of a software. In the current scenario, a variety of techniques like the statistical techniques, the Machine Learning (ML) techniques and the Search-based techniques (SBT) are available to develop models to predict software quality attributes. In this work, we assess the performance of ten machine learning and search-based techniques using data collected from three open source software. We first develop a change prediction model using one data set and then we perform inter-project validation using two other data sets in order to obtain unbiased and generalized results. The results of the study indicate comparable performance of SBT with other employed statistical and ML techniques. This study also supports inter project validation as we successfully applied the model created using the training data of one project on other similar projects and yield good results.