Paper accepted at the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

We are happy to announce the Steffen Herbold's article On the cost and profit of software defect prediction was accepted for publication by the IEEE Transactions on Software engineering. The article defines a cost model for software defect prediction. Based on the cost model, we derive required upper and lower boundaries that must be fulfilled in order for a defect prediction model to have any chance of saving costs. As part of the analysis of costs, we determined a systematic problem in nearly the complete body of literature of defect prediction: we ignore the n-to-m relationship between artifacts and defects and usually assume a 1-to-1 or 1-to-m relationship (binary labels, defect counts). However, costs of defect prediction models can vary a lot if the n-to-m relationship accounted for.