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Revisiting the Impact of Concept Drift on Just-in-Time Quality Assurance

The performance of software defect prediction(SDP) models is known to be dependent on the datasets used for training the models. Evolving data in a dynamic software development environment such as significant refactoring and organizational changes introduces new concept to the prediction model, thus making improved classification performance difficult. In this study, we investigate and assess the existence and impact of concept drift on SDP performances. We empirically asses the prediction performance of five models by conducting cross-version experiments using fifty-five releases of five open-source projects. Prediction performance fluctuated as the training datasets changed over time. Our results indicate that the quality and the reliability of defect prediction models fluctuate over time and that this instability should be considered by software quality teams when using historical datasets. The performance of a static predictor constructed with data from historical versions may degrade over time due to the challenges posed by concept drift.