Proposing an evolutionary-fuzzy method for software defects detection

Software defects detection is one of the most important challenges of software development and it is the most prohibitive process in software development. The early detection of fault-prone modules helps software project managers to allocate the limited cost, time, and effort of developers for testing the defect-prone modules more intensively.  In this paper, according to the importance of software defects detection, a method based on fuzzy sets and evolutionary algorithms is proposed. Due to the imbalanced nature of software defect detection datasets, benefits of fuzzy clustering algorithms were used to data sampling and more attention to the minority class. This method is a combined algorithm which, firstly has used fuzzy c-mean clustering as weighted bootstrap sampling. Weight of data (their membership’s degrees) increases for minority class. In the next step, the subtractive clustering algorithm is applied to produce the classifier which was trained by produced data in the previous step. The binary genetic algorithm was utilized to select appropriate features. The results and also comparisons with eight popular methods in software defect detection literature, show an acceptable performance of the proposed method. The experiments were performed on ten real-world datasets with a wide range of data sizes and imbalance rates. Also T-test is used as the statistical significance test for pair wise comparison of our proposed method against the others. The final results of T-test are shown in tables for three performance measures (G-mean, AUC and Balanced) over various datasets. (As the obtained results apparently show our proposed method has the ability to improve three aforementioned performance criteria simultaneously). Some methods just have improved the G-mean measure while the AUC and Balance criteria have lower values than the others. Securing a high level of three performance measures simultaneously illustrates the ability of our proposed algorithm for handling the imbalance problem of software defects detection datasets.