JITLine: A Simpler, Better, Faster, Finer-grained Just-In-Time Defect Prediction

TL;DR

JITLine is a new, efficient, and fine-grained approach for just-in-time defect prediction that outperforms existing methods in accuracy, speed, and line-level defect localization, aiding developers in prioritizing and identifying defects more effectively.

Contribution

We introduce JITLine, a novel approach that improves upon prior models by providing more accurate, faster, and line-level defect predictions in a just-in-time context.

Findings

JITLine achieves 26%-38% higher F-measure than existing methods.

JITLine is 70-100 times faster than CC2Vec and DeepJIT.

JITLine's line-level predictions are 133%-150% more accurate.

Abstract

A Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction model is a classifier to predict if a commit is defect-introducing. Recently, CC2Vec -- a deep learning approach for Just-In-Time defect prediction -- has been proposed. However, CC2Vec requires the whole dataset (i.e., training + testing) for model training, assuming that all unlabelled testing datasets would be available beforehand, which does not follow the key principles of just-in-time defect predictions. Our replication study shows that, after excluding the testing dataset for model training, the F-measure of CC2Vec is decreased by 38.5% for OpenStack and 45.7% for Qt, highlighting the negative impact of excluding the testing dataset for Just-In-Time defect prediction. In addition, CC2Vec cannot perform fine-grained predictions at the line level (i.e., which lines are most risky for a given commit). In this paper, we propose JITLine -- a Just-In-Time defect prediction approach for predicting defect-introducing commits and identifying lines that are associated with that defect-introducing commit (i.e., defective lines). Through a case study of 37,524 commits from OpenStack and Qt, we find that our JITLine approach is at least 26%-38% more accurate (F-measure), 17%-51% more cost-effective (PCI@20%LOC), 70-100 times faster than the state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., CC2Vec and DeepJIT) and the fine-grained predictions at the line level by our approach are 133%-150% more accurate (Top-10 Accuracy) than the baseline NLP approach. Therefore, our JITLine approach may help practitioners to better prioritize defect-introducing commits and better identify defective lines.