Prediction of software quality using classification tree modeling

Reliability of software systems is one of the major concerns in today's world as computers have really become an integral part of our lives. Society has become so dependent on reliable software systems that failures can be dangerous in terms of worsening a company's business, human relationships or affecting human lives. Software quality models are tools for focusing efforts to find faults early in the development. In this experiment, we used classification tree modeling techniques to predict the software quality by classifying program modules either as fault-prone or not fault-prone. We introduced the Classification And Regression Trees (scCART) algorithm as a tool to generate classification trees. We focused our experiments on very large telecommunications system to build quality models using set of product and process metrics as independent variables.