# Revisiting the Impact of Dependency Network Metrics on Software Defect Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [NDGGNET-A Node Independent Gate based Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05348/) (2022)
- [Predicting Line-Level Defects by Capturing Code Contexts with Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11889/) (2023)
- [DeMuVGN: Effective Software Defect Prediction Model by Learning Multi-view Software Dependency via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19550/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Software dependency network metrics extracted from the dependency graph of the software modules by the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA metrics) have been shown to improve the performance of the Software Defect prediction (SDP) models. However, the relative effectiveness of these SNA metrics over code metrics in improving the performance of the SDP models has been widely debated with no clear consensus. Furthermore, some of the common SDP scenarios like predicting the number of defects in a module (Defect-count) in Cross-version and Cross-project SDP contexts remain unexplored. Such lack of clear directive on the effectiveness of SNA metrics when compared to the widely used code metrics prevents us from potentially building better performing SDP models. Therefore, through a case study of 9 open source software projects across 30 versions, we study the relative effectiveness of SNA metrics when compared to code metrics across 3 commonly used SDP contexts (Within-project, Cross-version and Cross-project) and scenarios (Defect-count, Defect-classification (classifying if a module is defective) and Effort-aware (ranking the defective modules w.r.t to the involved effort)). We find the SNA metrics by themselves or along with code metrics improve the performance of SDP models over just using code metrics on 5 out of the 9 studied SDP scenarios (three SDP scenarios across three SDP contexts). However, we note that in some cases the improvements afforded by considering SNA metrics over or alongside code metrics might only be marginal, whereas in other cases the improvements could be potentially large. Based on these findings we suggest that the future work should: consider SNA metrics alongside code metrics in their SDP models; as well as consider Ego metrics and Global metrics, the two different types of the SNA metrics separately when training SDP models as they behave differently.