Exclusive use and evaluation of inheritance metrics viability in software fault prediction—an experimental study

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.