The ISBSG Software Project Repository: An Analysis from Six Sigma Measurement Perspective for Software Defect Estimation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) provides to researchers and practitioners a repository of software projects’ data that has been used to date mostly for benchmarking and project estimation purposes, but rarely for software defects analysis. Sigma, in statistics, measures how far a process deviates from its goal. Six Sigma focuses on reducing variations within processes, because such variations may lead to an inconsistency in achieving projects’ specifications which represent “defects”, which mean not meeting customers’ satisfaction. Six Sigma provides two methodologies to solve organizations’ problems: “Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control” process cycle (DMAIC) and Design of Six Sigma (DFSS). The DMAIC focuses on improving the existed processes, while the DFSS focuses on redesigning the existing processes and developing new processes. This paper presents an approach to provide an analysis of ISBSG repository based on Six Sigma measurements. It investigates the use of the ISBSG data repository with some of the related Six Sigma measurement aspects, including Sigma defect measurement and software defect estimation. This study presents the dataset preparation consisting of two levels of data preparations, and then analyzed the quality-related data fields in the ISBSG MS-Excel data extract (Release 12 - 2013). It also presents an analysis of the extracted dataset of software projects. This study has found that the ISBSG MS-Excel data extract has a high ratio of missing data within the data fields of “Total Number of Defects” variable, which represents a serious challenge when the ISBSG dataset is being used for software defect estimation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.026 | 0.035 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".