How Simple is Software Defect Detection?

Sofiware defect detectors input structural metrics of code and output a prediction of how faulty a code module might be. Previous studies have shown that such metrics many be confused by the high correlation between metrics. To resolve this, feature subset selection (FSS) techniques such as principal components analysis can be used to reduce the dimensionality of metric sets in hopes of creating smaller and more accurate detectors. This study benchmarks several FSS techniques and reports several studies where a large set metrics were be reduced to a handful with little loss of detection accuracy. This result raises the possibility that sofrware defect detection may be much simpler than previously believed.