A Possibilistic Evolutionary Approach to Handle the Uncertainty of Software Metrics Thresholds in Code Smells Detection

Informations générales

Année de publication

2021

Type

Conférence

Description

IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)

Résumé
A code smells detection rule is a combination of metrics with their corresponding crisp thresholds and labels. The goal of this paper is to deal with metrics' thresholds uncertainty; as usually such thresholds could not be exactly determined to judge the smelliness of a particular software class. To deal with this issue, we first propose to encode each metric value into a binary possibility distribution with respect to a threshold computed from a discretization technique; using the Possibilistic C-means classifier. Then, we propose ADIPOK-UMT as an evolutionary algorithm that evolves a population of PK-NN classifiers for the detection of smells under thresholds' uncertainty. The experimental results reveal that the possibility distribution-based encoding allows the implicit weighting of software metrics (features) with respect to their computed discretization thresholds. Moreover, ADIPOK-UMT is shown to outperform four relevant state-of-art approaches on a set of commonly adopted benchmark software systems.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{boutaib2021possibilistic,
author = {Boutaib, Sofien and Elarbi, Maha and Bechikh, Slim and Palomba, Fabio and Ben Said, Lamjed},
title = {A Possibilistic Evolutionary Approach to Handle the Uncertainty of Software Metrics Thresholds in Code Smells Detection},
booktitle = {EuroGP 2021: Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Genetic Programming},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
volume = {12691},
pages = {181--197},
year = {2021},
publisher = {Springer Verlag},
isbn = {978-3-030-72811-3},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-72812-0_12}
}