Software Failure Prediction and Efficiency Optimization Using AI/ML Techniques

Abstract

Software reliability remains a major concern in modern software engineering due to the increasing complexity of software systems and the rapid pace of development. Software Failure Prediction (SFP) aims to identify fault-prone modules before deployment, enabling organizations to reduce maintenance costs and improve system quality. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques provide data-driven approaches for analyzing software metrics, defect repositories, and execution logs to predict failures. This review examines AI/ML-based approaches for software failure prediction and efficiency optimization, with explicit attention to benchmark datasets, dataset quality, preprocessing, class imbalance, feature selection, model families, validation strategies, and evaluation measures. Representative NASA and PROMISE/Jureczko datasets are characterized in terms of software-unit type, metric families, binary defect labels, and imbalance. The review emphasizes Precision, Recall, F1-score, ROC-AUC, and MCC in addition to accuracy and compares traditional ML, ensemble, and deep-learning approaches. It further discusses missing data, concept drift, and cross-project prediction as key factors affecting real-world generalization. The analysis indicates that no single model is universally optimal; robust software failure prediction requires dataset-aware preprocessing, leakage-safe validation, imbalance-aware evaluation, and an explicit trade-off among predictive performance, computational efficiency, and interpretability.