Software quality prediction using Affinity Propagation algorithm

Software metrics are collected at various phases of the software development process. These metrics contain the information of the software and can be used to predict software quality in the early stage of software life cycle. Intelligent computing techniques such as data mining can be applied in the study of software quality by analyzing software metrics. Clustering analysis, which can be considered as one of the data mining techniques, is adopted to build the software quality prediction models in the early period of software testing. In this paper, a new clustering method called Affinity Propagation is investigated for the analysis of two software metric datasets extracted from real-world software projects. Meanwhile, K-Means clustering method is also applied for comparison. The numerical experiment results show that the Affinity Propagation algorithm can be applied well in software quality prediction in the very early stage, and it is more effective on reducing Type II error.