Abstract
Traditional software reliability growth models (SRGM) characterize defect discovery with the Non‐Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) as a function of testing time or effort. More recently, covariate NHPP SRGM models have substantially improved tracking and prediction of the defect discovery process by explicitly incorporating discrete multivariate time series on the amount of each underlying testing activity performed in successive intervals. Both classes of NHPP models with and without covariates are parametric in nature, imposing assumptions on the defect discovery process, and, while neural networks have been applied to SRGM models without covariates, no such studies have been applied in the context of covariate SRGM models. Therefore, this paper assesses the effectiveness of neural networks in predicting the software defect discovery process, incorporating covariates. Three types of neural networks are considered, including (i) recurrent neural networks (RNNs), (ii) long short‐term memory (LSTM), and (iii) gated recurrent unit (GRU), which are then compared with covariate models to validate tracking and predictive accuracy. Our results suggest that GRU achieved better overall goodness‐of‐fit, such as approximately 3.22 and 1.10 times smaller predictive mean square error, and 5.33 and 1.22 times smaller predictive ratio risk in DS1G and DS2G data sets, respectively, compared to covariate models when of the data is used for training. Moreover, to provide an objective comparison, three different proportions for training data splits were employed to illustrate the advancements between the top‐performing covariate NHPP model and the neural network, in which GRU illustrated a better performance over most of the scenarios. Thus, the neural network model with gated recurrent units may be a suitable alternative to track and predict the number of defects based on covariates associated with the software testing process.