Defect data analysis based on extended association rule mining

This paper describes an empirical study to reveal rules associated with defect correction effort. We defined defect correction effort as a quantitative (ratio scale) variable, and extended conventional (nominal scale based) association rule mining to directly handle such quantitative variables. An extended rule describes the statistical characteristic of a ratio or interval scale variable in the consequent part of the rule by its mean value and standard deviation so that conditions producing distinctive statistics can be discovered. As an analysis target, we collected various attributes of about 1,200 defects found in a typical medium-scale, multi-vendor (distance development) information system development project in Japan. Our findings based on extracted rules include: (1)Defects detected in coding/unit testing were easily corrected (less than 7% of mean effort) when they are related to data output or validation of input data. (2)Nevertheless, they sometimes required much more effort (lift of standard deviation was 5.845) in case of low reproducibility, (3)Defects introduced in coding/unit testing often required large correction effort (mean was 12.596 staff-hours and standard deviation was 25.716) when they were related to data handing. From these findings, we confirmed that we need to pay attention to types of defects having large mean effort as well as those having large standard deviation of effort since such defects sometimes cause excess effort.