Title: Use of Source Code Similarity Metrics in Software Defect Prediction,
Abstract: In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in
the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before
the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance
costs but also increase the overall quality of a software product. There are
different types of product, process, and developer based software metrics
proposed so far to measure the defectiveness of a software system. This paper
suggests to use a novel set of software metrics which are based on the
similarities detected among the source code files in a software project. To
find source code similarities among different files of a software system,
plagiarism and clone detection techniques are used. Two simple similarity
metrics are calculated for each file, considering its overall similarity to the
defective and non defective files in the project. Using these similarity
metrics, we predict whether a specific file is defective or not. Our
experiments on 10 open source data sets show that depending on the amount of
detected similarity, proposed metrics could achieve significantly better
performance compared to the existing static code metrics in terms of the area
under the curve (AUC).