Using in-process testing metrics to estimate post-release field quality of Java programs
Nachiappan Nagappan, Laurie A. Williams, Mladen Alan Vouk, Jason A. Osborne · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 2006
In industrial practice, information on the software field quality of a product is available too late in the software lifecycle to guide affordable corrective action.An important step towards remediation of this problem lies in the ability to provide an early estimation of post-release field quality.This paper presents a suite of nine static inprocess unit test metrics, the Software Testing and Reliability Early Warning for Java (STREW-J) metric suite.The STREW-J metrics can be used to leverage the software testing effort to predict post-release field quality early and throughout the software development phases.The metric suite is applicable for software products implemented in Java for which an extensive suite of automated unit test cases are incrementally created as development proceeds.We built and validated a prediction model using the STREW-J metrics via a three-phase case study approach which progressively involved 22 small-scale academic projects, 27 medium-sized open source projects, and five industrial projects.The ability of the STREW-J metric suite to estimate post-release field quality via a statistical regression model was evaluated in the three different environments.The error in estimation and the sensitivity of the predictions indicate the STREW-J metric suite can be used effectively to predict post-release software field quality.