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Software fault prediction (SFP) is a research area that helps development and testing process deliver software of good quality. Software metrics are of various types and are used in SFP for measurements. Inheritance is a prominent feature, which measures the depth, breadth, and complexity of object-oriented software. A few studies exclusively addressed the efficacy of inheritance in SFP. This provokes the need to identify the potential ingredients associated with inheritance, which can be helpful in SFP. In this paper, our aim is to collecting, organizing, categorizing, and investigating published fault prediction studies. Findings include identification of 54 inheritance metrics, 78 public datasets with various combinations of 10 inheritance metrics, 60% use of method level & use of private datasets, an increased number of studies using machine learning approaches. This study will facilitate scholars to studying previous literature on software fault prediction having software metrics, with their methods, public data sets, performance evaluation of machine learning algorithms, and findings of experimental results in a comfortable, and efficient way, emphasizing the inherited aspect specifically.

Fault prediction is a necessity to deliver high-quality software. The absence of training data and mechanism to labeling a cluster faulty or fault-free is a topic of concern in software fault prediction (SFP). Inheritance is an important feature of object-oriented development, and its metrics measure the complexity, depth, and breadth of software. In this paper, we aim to experimentally validate how much inheritance metrics are helpful to classify unlabeled data sets besides conceiving a novel mechanism to label a cluster as faulty or fault-free. We have collected ten public data sets that have inheritance and C&K metrics. Then, these base datasets are further split into two datasets labeled as C&K with inheritance and the C&K dataset for evaluation. K-means clustering is applied, Euclidean formula to compute distances and then label clusters through the average mechanism. Finally, TPR, Recall, Precision, F1 measures, and ROC are computed to measure performance which showed an adequate impact of inheritance metrics in SFP specifically classifying unlabeled datasets and correct classification of instances. The experiment also reveals that the average mechanism is suitable to label clusters in SFP. The quality assurance practitioners can benefit from the utilization of metrics associated with inheritance for labeling datasets and clusters.

Software Fault Prediction (SFP) assists in the identification of faulty classes, and software metrics provide us with a mechanism for this purpose. Besides others, metrics addressing inheritance in Object-Oriented (OO) are important as these measure depth, hierarchy, width, and overriding complexity of the software. In this paper, we evaluated the exclusive use, and viability of inheritance metrics in SFP through experiments. We perform a survey of inheritance metrics whose data sets are publicly available, and collected about 40 data sets having inheritance metrics. We cleaned, and filtered them, and captured nine inheritance metrics. After preprocessing, we divided selected data sets into all possible combinations of inheritance metrics, and then we merged similar metrics. We then formed 67 data sets containing only inheritance metrics that have nominal binary class labels. We performed a model building, and validation for Support Vector Machine(SVM). Results of Cross-Entropy, Accuracy, F-Measure, and AUC advocate viability of inheritance metrics in software fault prediction. Furthermore, ic, noc, and dit metrics are helpful in reduction of error entropy rate over the rest of the 67 feature sets.

Software faults can cause trivial annoyance to catastrophic failures. Recent work in software fault prediction (SFP) advocates the need for predicting faults before deployment to aid testing process. Object-oriented programming is complex while comparing it with procedural languages having multiple dimensions wherein inheritance is an important aspect. In this paper, we aim to investigate how much inheritance metrics assist in predicting software fault proneness. We first select the Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) metrics, most accepted metric suite for predicting software faults and inheritance metrics. We use 65 publicly available base datasets having CK metrics and some other inheritance metrics to evaluate the impact of inheritance on SFP. We split each dataset into further two datasets: inheritance with CK and CK without inheritance for comparison of results. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used for model building, and accuracy, recall, precision, F1 measures, and true negative rate (TNR) are used for measuring performance. Comparison is made and the results show an acceptable contribution of inheritance metrics in SFP. The testing community can safely use inheritance metrics in predicting software faults. Moreover, high inheritance is not desirable, as this can potentially lead to software faults.