The same defect may be rediscovered by multiple clients, causing unplanned outages and leading to reduced customer satisfaction. One solution is forcing clients to install a fix for every defect. However, this approach is economically infeasible, because it requires extra resources and increases downtime. Moreover, it may lead to regression of functionality, as new fixes may break the existing functionality. Our goal is to find a way to proactively predict defects that a client may rediscover in the future. We build a predictive model by leveraging recommender algorithms. We evaluate our approach with extracted rediscovery data from four groups of large-scale open source software projects (namely, Eclipse, Gentoo, KDE, and Libre) and one enterprise software. The datasets contain information about ⇡ 1.33 million unique defect reports over a period of 18 years (1999-2017). Our proposed approach may help in understanding the defect rediscovery phenomenon, leading to improvement of software quality and customer satisfaction.
Software Quality Assurance in Software Projects: A Study of Pakistan
