An analysis of the 'inconclusive' change report category in OSS assisted by a program slicing metric

In this paper, we investigate the Barcode open-source system (OSS) using one of Weiser's original slice-based metrics (Tightness) as a basis. In previous work, low numerical values of this slice-based metric were found to indicate fault-free (as opposed to fault-prone) functions. In the same work, we deliberately excluded from our analysis a category comprising 221 of the 775 observations representing 'inconclusive' log reports extracted from the OSS change logs. These represented OSS change log descriptions where it was not entirely clear whether a fault had occurred or not in a function and, for that reason, could not reasonably be incorporated into our analysis. In this paper we present a methodology through which we can draw conclusions about that category of report.