Predicting Defective Lines Using a Model-Agnostic Technique

Abstract

Defect prediction models are proposed to help a team prioritize source code areas files that need Software QualityAssurance (SQA) based on the likelihood of having defects. However, developers may waste their unnecessary effort on the whole filewhile only a small fraction of its source code lines are defective. Indeed, we find that as little as 1%-3% of lines of a file are defective. Hence, in this work, we propose a novel framework (called LINE-DP) to identify defective lines using a model-agnostic technique, i.e., an Explainable AI technique that provides information why the model makes such a prediction. Broadly speaking, our LINE-DP first builds a file-level defect model using code token features. Then, our LINE-DP uses a state-of-the-art model-agnostic technique (i.e.,LIME) to identify risky tokens, i.e., code tokens that lead the file-level defect model to predict that the file will be defective. Then, the lines that contain risky tokens are predicted as defective lines. Through a case study of 32 releases of nine Java open source systems, our evaluation results show that our LINE-DP achieves an average recall of 0.61, a false alarm rate of 0.47, a top 20%LOC recall of0.27, and an initial false alarm of 16, which are statistically better than six baseline approaches. Our evaluation shows that our LINE-DP requires an average computation time of 10 seconds including model construction and defective line identification time. In addition, we find that 63% of defective lines that can be identified by our LINE-DP are related to common defects (e.g., argument change, condition change). These results suggest that our LINE-DP can effectively identify defective lines that contain common defectswhile requiring a smaller amount of inspection effort and a manageable computation cost.