An experimental study for software quality prediction with machine learning methods

Software quality estimation is an activity needed at various stages of software development. It may be used for planning the project's quality assurance practices and for benchmarking. In earlier previous studies, two methods (Multiple Criteria Linear Programming and Multiple Criteria Quadratic Programming) for estimating the quality of software had been used Also, C5.0, SVM and Neutral network were experimented with for quality estimation. These studies have relatively low accuracies. In this study, we aimed to improve estimation accuracy by using relevant features of a large dataset. We used a feature selection method and correlation matrix for reaching higher accuracies. In addition, we have experimented with recent methods shown to be successful for other prediction tasks. Machine learning algorithms such as Xgboost, Random Forest and Decision Tree are applied to the data to predict the software quality and reveal the relation between the quality and development attributes. The experimental results show that the quality level of software can be well estimated by machine learning algorithms.