Software defect prediction using hybrid model (CBIL) of convolutional neural network (CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM).

In recent years, the software industry has invested substantial effort to improve software quality in organizations. Applying proactive software defect prediction will help developers and white box testers to find the defects earlier, and this will reduce the time and effort. Traditional software defect prediction models concentrate on traditional features of source code including code complexity, lines of code, etc. However, these features fail to extract the semantics of source code. In this research, we propose a hybrid model that is called CBIL. CBIL can predict the defective areas of source code. It extracts Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) tokens as vectors from source code. Mapping and word embedding turn integer vectors into dense vectors. Then, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) extracts the semantics of AST tokens. After that, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) keeps key features and ignores other features in order to enhance the accuracy of software defect prediction. The proposed model CBIL is evaluated on a sample of seven open-source Java projects of the PROMISE dataset. CBIL is evaluated by applying the following evaluation metrics: F-measure and area under the curve (AUC). The results display that CBIL model improves the average of F-measure by 25% compared to CNN, as CNN accomplishes the top performance among the selected baseline models. In average of AUC, CBIL model improves AUC by 18% compared to Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), as RNN accomplishes the top performance among the selected baseline models used in the experiments.

Adaptive model to support business process reengineering.

The one constant in the world is change. The changing dynamics of business environment enforces the organizations to re-design or reengineer their business processes. The main objective of such reengineering processes is to provide services or produce products with the possible lowest cost, shortest time, and best quality. Accordingly, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) provides a roadmap of how to efficiently achieve the operational goals in terms of enhanced flexibility and productivity, reduced cost, and improved quality of service or product. In this article, we propose an efficient model for BPR. The model specifies where the breakdowns occur in BPR implementation, justifies why such breakdowns occur, and proposes techniques to prevent their occurrence again. The proposed model has been built based on two main sections. The first section focuses on integrating Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and the performance of business processes during the reengineering processes. Additionally, it implements the association rule mining technique to investigate the relationship between CSFs and different business processes. The second section aims to measure the performance of business processes (intended success of BPR) by process time, cycle time, quality and cost before and after reengineering processes. A case study of the Egyptian Tax Authority (ETA) is used to test the efficiency of the proposed model.