Analyzing Machine Learning Techniques for Fault Prediction Using Web Applications

Web applications are indispensable in the software industry and continuously evolve either meeting a newer criteria and/or including new functionalities. However, despite assuring quality via testing, what hinders a straightforward development is the presence of defects. Several factors contribute to defects and are often minimized at high expense in terms of man-hours. Thus, detection of fault proneness in early phases of software development is important. Therefore, a fault prediction model for identifying fault-prone classes in a web application is highly desired. In this work, we compare 14 machine learning techniques to analyse the relationship between object oriented metrics and fault prediction in web applications. The study is carried out using various releases of Apache Click and Apache Rave datasets. En-route to the predictive analysis, the input basis set for each release is first optimized using filter based correlation feature selection (CFS) method. It is found that the LCOM3, WMC, NPM and DAM metrics are the most significant predictors. The statistical analysis of these metrics also finds good conformity with the CFS evaluation and affirms the role of these metrics in the defect prediction of web applications. The overall predictive ability of different fault prediction models is first ranked using Friedman technique and then statistically compared using Nemenyi post-hoc analysis. The results not only upholds the predictive capability of machine learning models for faulty classes using web applications, but also finds that ensemble algorithms are most appropriate for defect prediction in Apache datasets. Further, we also derive a consensus between the metrics selected by the CFS technique and the statistical analysis of the datasets.