Maximum profit mining and its application in software development

While most software defects (i.e., bugs) are corrected and tested as part of the lengthy software development cycle, enterprise software vendors often have to release software products before all reported defects are corrected, due to deadlines and limited resources. A small number of these defects will be escalated by customers and they must be resolved immediately by the software vendors at a very high cost. In this paper, we develop an Escalation Prediction (EP) system that mines historic defect report data and predict the escalation risk of the defects for maximum net profit. More specifically, we first describe a simple and general framework to convert the maximum net profit problem to cost-sensitive learning. We then apply and compare several well-known cost-sensitive learning approaches for EP. Our experiments suggest that the cost-sensitive decision tree is the best method for producing the highest positive net profit and comprehensible results. The EP system has been deployed successfully in the product group of an enterprise software vendor.