STUDYING SOFTWARE QUALITY USING TOPIC MODELS
Tse-Hsun Peter Chen · 2013
Software is an integral part of our everyday lives, and hence the quality of software is very important. However, improving and maintaining high software quality is a difficult task, and a significant amount of resources is spent on fixing software defects. Previous studies have studied software quality using various measurable aspects of software, such as code size and code change history. Nevertheless, these metrics do not consider all possible factors that are related to defects. For instance, while lines of code may be a good general measure for defects, a large file respon-sible for simple I/O tasks is likely to have fewer defects than a small file responsible for complicated compiler implementation details. In this thesis, we address this is-sue by considering the conceptual concerns (or features). We use a statistical topic modelling approach to approximate the conceptual concerns as topics. We then use topics to study software quality along two dimensions: code quality and code tested-ness. We perform our studies using three versions of four large real-world software systems: Mylyn, Eclipse, Firefox, and NetBeans.