Studying the impact of dependency network measures on software quality

Dependency network measures capture various facets of the dependencies among software modules. For example, betweenness centrality measures how much information flows through a module compared to the rest of the network. Prior studies have shown that these measures are good predictors of post-release failures. However, these studies did not explore the causes for such good performance and did not provide guidance for practitioners to avoid future bugs. In this paper, we closely examine the causes for such performance by replicating prior studies using data from the Eclipse project. Our study shows that a small subset of dependency network measures have a large impact on post-release failure, while other network measures have a very limited impact. We also analyze the benefit of bug prediction in reducing testing cost. Finally, we explore the practical implications of the important network measures.

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