An approach for fault prediction in SOA-based systems using machine learning techniques

Purpose Software fault prediction is an important concept that can be applied at an early stage of the software life cycle. Effective prediction of faults may improve the reliability and testability of software systems. As service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based systems become more and more complex, the interaction between participating services increases frequently. The component services may generate enormous reports and fault information. Although considerable research has stressed on developing fault-proneness prediction models in service-oriented systems (SOS) using machine learning (ML) techniques, there has been little work on assessing how effective the source code metrics are for fault prediction. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors have proposed a fault prediction framework to investigate fault prediction in SOS using metrics of web services. The effectiveness of the model has been explored by applying six ML techniques, namely, Naive Bayes, Artificial Networks (ANN), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), decision tree, Random Forests and Support Vector Machine (SVM), along with five feature selection techniques to extract the essential metrics. The authors have explored accuracy, precision, recall, f-measure and receiver operating characteristic curves of the area under curve values as performance measures. Findings The experimental results show that the proposed system can classify the fault-proneness of web services, whether the service is faulty or non-faulty, as a binary-valued output automatically and effectively. Originality/value In the literature, only few studies have been observed to directly concentrate on metrics-based fault-proneness prediction of SOS using ML techniques. However, most of the contributions are regarding the fault prediction of the general systems rather than SOS. A majority of them have considered reliability, changeability, maintainability using a logging/history-based approach and mathematical modeling rather than fault prediction in SOS using metrics. Thus, the authors have extended the above contributions further by applying supervised ML techniques over web services metrics and measured their capability by employing fault injection methods.