Do Internal Software Metrics Have Relationship with Fault-proneness and Change-proneness?

Change-proneness indicates the possibility of changes to a software system. Both of these measures are related to software maintainability which impact internal software metrics such as size, inheritance, coupling, etc. due to making many changes to the system. In the literature, change- and fault-proneness have been predicted using the internal software metrics which are almost one decade earlier. Therefore, as software systems and structures are evolving in nature, we present an empirical study to revisit the relationship of the internal software metrics with change- and fault-proneness to provide up-to-date insights. In particular, we identify 25 internal software metrics, change-proneness and fault-proneness in the wellknown open source systems from Apache and Eclipse ecosystems. Then we analyse the relationship based on the statistical correlation method. The results show that almost all of the metrics have no or low relationship with fault-proneness, while inheritance, coupling and comments-related metrics have a moderate or high relationship with change-proneness. These findings will assist developers to minimize the higher related software metrics to enhance maintainability in terms of change- and fault-proneness. In addition, these also help researchers to innovate change and fault prediction approaches by incorporating the higher related metrics.