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A Bayesian network approach to assist on the interpretation of software metrics

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Despite the quantity of software metrics that has been proposed, their adoption and application by practitioners has been limited. A challenge to their use is to interpret them to perform assessments and predictions. The existing approaches to assist with their interpretation consists of defining thresholds to determine whether the value of a metric is acceptable. These approaches are not enough to ensure a correct metrics' interpretation, because they ignore risks and other subjective factors that influence the measurement process. This might affect the metrics' interpretation, and consequently, the manager's decision. To minimize wrong decisions based on software metrics, we present a method to construct Bayesian networks to assist on metric interpretation considering these risks. We successfully validated the method with a case study performed in three software development projects. We concluded that it is a promising approach to assist practitioners to interpret metrics and support software projects managerial decision-making.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)A 20‐year mapping of Bayesian belief networks in software project managementIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1204316:1(14-28)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2021
  • (2020)A Bayesian Networks-Based Method to Analyze the Validity of the Data of Software Measurement ProgramsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30352178(198801-198821)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)A Domain-Sensitive Threshold Derivation MethodProceedings of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3330204.3330252(1-8)Online publication date: 20-May-2019
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2015
2418 pages
ISBN:9781450331968
DOI:10.1145/2695664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. bayesian networks
  2. managerial decision-making
  3. software development projects
  4. software metrics
  5. software metrics semantic

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SAC 2015
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SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing
April 13 - 17, 2015
Salamanca, Spain

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SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 31 - April 4, 2025
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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)A 20‐year mapping of Bayesian belief networks in software project managementIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1204316:1(14-28)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2021
  • (2020)A Bayesian Networks-Based Method to Analyze the Validity of the Data of Software Measurement ProgramsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30352178(198801-198821)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)A Domain-Sensitive Threshold Derivation MethodProceedings of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3330204.3330252(1-8)Online publication date: 20-May-2019
  • (2019)On the proposal and evaluation of a benchmark-based threshold derivation methodSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-018-9405-y27:1(275-306)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
  • (2018)Evaluating domain-specific metric thresholdsProceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3194164.3194173(41-50)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2018)Measuring Developers' Contribution in Source Code using Quality Metrics2018 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design ((CSCWD))10.1109/CSCWD.2018.8465320(39-44)Online publication date: May-2018

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