Abstract
The Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science, prediction of software
defects and defect patterns is and will continue to be a critically important software evolution research
topic. This study presents a time series analysis of multi-organizational multi-project defects reported
during ongoing software evolution efforts. Using data from monthly defect reports for eight open source
software projects over five years, this study builds and tests time series models for each sampled project.
The resulting model accounts for the ripple effects of defect detection and correction by modeling the
autocorrelation of code defect data. The autoregressive integrated moving average model (0,1,1) was found
to hold for all sampled projects and thus provide a basis for both descriptive and predictive software
defect analysis that is computationally efficient, comprehensible, and easy to apply. The model may be
used to evaluate and compare the reliability of candidate software solutions, and to facilitate planning for
software evolution budget and time allocation.
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