Micro Pattern Fault-Proneness

One of the goals of Software Engineering is to reduce, or at least to try to control, the defectiveness of software systems during the development phase. The aim of our study is to analyze the relationship between micro patterns (introduced by Gil and Maman) and faults in a software system. Micro patterns are similar to design patterns, but their characteristic is that they can be identified automatically, and are at a lower level of abstraction with respect to design patterns. Our study aims to show, through empirical studies of open source software systems, which categories of micro patterns are more correlated to faults. Gil and Maman demonstrated, and subsequent studies confirmed, that 75% of the classes of a software system are covered by micro patterns. In our study we also analyze the relationship between faults and the remaining 25% of classes that do not match with any micro pattern. We found that these classes are more likely to be fault-prone than the others. We also studied the correlation among all the micro patterns of the catalog, in order to verify the existence of relationships between them.