User:AJim/bugs
Hello,
I attended a talk [1] by Elaine Weyuker [2] on Wed, 7 Nov 2012.
The talk, “Looking for Bugs In All the RIGHT Places”, discussed her work on predicting where bugs would be found in the next release of a program product.
She and her collaborators have created a well validated tool that predicts, in under a minute, the 20% of the source files of the product, frozen before the next release, that will contain about 80% of the faults that will be corrected in that release.
The tool is not a silver bullet, but it is useful; especially because it sometimes points attention to files that were not expected to have a lot of problems.
The tool has two parts, a prediction front end and a back end interface to the revision control system and bug tracker. As I remember it, the entire system consisted of under 800 lines of python and under 3000 lines of C++. Using it would require adding a new back end.
I thought that this tool might be useful in mediawiki development. She seemed amenable to helping get it working if there was interest.