Project Evolution-aware Prompting of LLMs for Just-in-time Defect Prediction in Edge-cloud Systems

Edge-cloud systems, which bring computing, storage, and networking resources closer to end-users, offer significant advantages in reducing latency and enabling real-time data processing. These systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, such as smart manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, and large-scale IoT networks, to support big data-driven services that require continuous analytics and rapid response. Ensuring software reliability in these environments is critical, which has led to growing attention on just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction as an effective technique for prioritizing testing efforts by identifying code changes likely to introduce defects. However, existing techniques struggle to perform accurately on new or low-data projects due to insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose PROPER-SDP, a prompt-based approach that leverages large language models. By incorporating project evolution data directly into prompts, our approach enables LLMs to effectively capture the contextual information essential for accurate JIT defect prediction. By doing so, we effectively address the cold-start problem, allowing accurate JIT defect prediction even in the absence of project-specific training data. Evaluation results demonstrate that our method significantly improves prediction performance, surpassing baseline methods by an average of 19.7% in F1-score. Our approach enables reliable JIT defect prediction even in rapidly evolving, resource-constrained edge-cloud systems.