Guasti, Peter John.

Accurately predicting the quality of software is a major problem in any software development project. Software engineers develop models that provide early estimates of quality metrics which allow them to take action against emerging quality problems. Most often the predictive models are based upon multiple regression analysis which become unstable when certain data assumptions are not met. Since neural networks require no data assumptions, they are more appropriate for predicting software quality. This study proposes an improved neural network architecture that significantly outperforms multiple regression and other neural network attempts at modeling software quality. This is demonstrated by applying this approach to several large commercial software systems. After developing neural network models, we develop regression models on the same data. We find that the neural network models surpass the regression models in terms of predictive quality on the data sets considered.