Empirical Study of Software Defect Prediction: A Systematic Mapping

Software defect prediction has been one of the key areas of exploration in the domain of software quality. In this paper, we perform a systematic mapping to analyze all the software defect prediction literature available from 1995 to 2018 using a multi-stage process. A total of 156 studies are selected in the first step, and the final mapping is conducted based on these studies. The ability of a model to learn from data that does not come from the same project or organization will help organizations that do not have sufficient training data or are going to start work on new projects. The findings of this research are useful not only to the software engineering domain, but also to the empirical studies, which mainly focus on symmetry as they provide steps-by-steps solutions for questions raised in the article.