In recent years, with the rapid development of software systems, the continuous expansion of software scale and the increasing complexity of systems have led to the emergence of a growing number of software metrics. Defect prediction methods based on software metric elements highly rely on software metric data. However, redundant software metric data is not conducive to efficient defect prediction, posing severe challenges to current software defect prediction tasks. To address these issues, this paper focuses on the rational clustering of software metric data. Firstly, multiple software projects are evaluated to determine the preset number of clusters for software metrics, and various clustering methods are employed to cluster the metric elements. Subsequently, a co-occurrence matrix is designed to comprehensively quantify the number of times that metrics appear in the same category. Based on the comprehensive results, the software metric data are divided into two semantic views containing different metrics, thereby analyzing the semantic information behind the software metrics. On this basis, this paper also conducts an in-depth analysis of the impact of different semantic view of metrics on defect prediction results, as well as the performance of various classification models under these semantic views. Experiments show that the joint use of the two semantic views can significantly improve the performance of models in software defect prediction, providing a new understanding and approach at the semantic view level for defect prediction research based on software metrics.

Generating meaningful assert statements is one of the key challenges in automated test case generation, which requires understanding the intended functionality of the tested code. Recently, deep learning based models have shown promise in improving the performance of assert statement generation. However, the existing models only rely on the test prefixes along with their corresponding focal methods, yet ignore the developer-written summarization. Based on our observations, the summarization contents usually express the intended program behavior or contain parameters that will appear directly in the assert statement. Such information will help existing models address their current inability to accurately predict assert statements. This paper presents a summarization-guided approach for automatically generating assert statements. To derive generic representations for natural language (i.e., summarization) and programming language (i.e., test prefixes and focal methods), we leverage a pre-trained language model as the reference architecture and fine-tune it on the task of assert statement generation. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach makes the first attempt to leverage the summarization of focal methods as the guidance for making the generated assert statements more accurate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two real-world datasets compared with state-of-the-art models.