empirical study of module order models

Most software reliability approaches classify modules as fault-prone or not fault-prone by way of a predetermined threshold. However, it may not be practical to predefine a threshold because the amount of resources for reliability enhancement may be unknown. Therefore, a module-order model (MOM) predicting the rank order of modules can be used to solve this problem. The objective of this research is to make an empirical study of MOMs based on five different underlying quantitative software quality models. We examine the benefits of principal components analysis with MOM and demonstrate that better accuracy of underlying techniques does not always yield better performance with MOM. Three case studies of large industrial software systems were conducted. The results confirm that MOM can create efficient models using different underlying techniques that provide various accuracy when predicting a quantitative software quality factor over the data sets.