Temporal Convolutional Networks for Just-in-Time Software Defect Prediction

: Defect prediction and estimation techniques play a significant role in software maintenance and evolution. Recently, several research studies proposed just-in-time techniques to predict defective changes. Such prediction models make the developers check and fix the defects just at the time they are introduced (commit level). Nev-ertheless, early prediction of defects is still a challenging task that needs to be addressed and can be improved by getting higher performances. To address this issue this paper proposes an approach exploiting a large set of features corresponding to source code metrics detected from commits history of software projects. In partic-ular, the approach uses deep temporal convolutional networks to make the fault prediction. The evaluation is performed on a large data-set, concerning four well-known open-source projects and shows that, under certain considerations, the proposed approach has effective defect proneness prediction ability.