Revisiting the Impact of Anti-patterns on Fault-Proneness: A Differentiated Replication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anti-patterns manifesting on software code through code smells have been investigated in terms of their prevalence, detection, refactoring, and impact on software quality attributes. In particular, leveraging heuristics to identify fault-fixing commits, Khomh et al. have found that anti-patterns and code smells have an impact on the fault-proneness of a software system. Similarly, Saboury et al. found a relationship between anti-pattern occurrences and fault-proneness, using heuristic to identify fault-fixing commits and fault-inducing changes. However, recent studies question the accuracy of heuristics, and thus the validity of empirical studies that leverage it. Hence, in this work, we would like to investigate to what extent the results of empirical studies using heuristics to identify bug fix commits are affected by the limitations of the heuristics based approach using manually validated bug fix commits as a ground truth. In particular, we conduct a differentiated replication of the work by Khomh et al. We particularly focused on the impact of anti-patterns on fault-proneness as it is the only dependent variable that may be affected by noise in the collected faults data. In our differentiated replication study, (1) we expanded the number of subject systems from 5 to 38, (2) utilized a manually validated dataset of bug-fixing commits from the work of Herbold et al., and (3) answered research questions from Khomh et al., that are related to the relationship between anti-pattern occurrences and fault-proneness. (4) We added an additional research question to investigate if combining results from several heuristic-based approaches could help reduce the impact of noise. Our findings show that the impact of the noise generated by the automatic algorithm heuristic based is negligible for the studied subject systems; meaning that the reported relation observed on noisy data still holds on the clean data. However, we also observed that combining results from several heuristic based approaches do not reduce this noise, quite the contrary.
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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 | 0.036 | 0.212 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".