Institute for Software Research
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
An Empirical Comparison of Field Defect Modeling Methods
Paul Luo Li, Mary Shaw, Jim Herbsleb, P. Santhanam*, Bonnie Ray*
May 2005
In this study, we report empirical results from forecasting field
defect rates and predicting the number of field defects for a large
commercial software system. We find that we are not able to accurately
forecast field defect rates using a combined time-based and
metrics-based approach, as judged by the Theil forecasting statistic.
We suggest possible conditions that may have contributed to the poor
results. Next, we use metrics-based approaches to predict the number
of field defects within the six months after deployment. We find that
the simple ratios method produce more accurate predictions than more
complex metrics-based methods. Our results are steps toward
quantitatively managing the risks associated with software field defects.
17 pages
*Center for Software Engineering, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY 10532
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