Recently, software development projects have been required to produce highly reliable systems
within a short period and with low cost. In such situation, software quality prediction helps to
confirm that the software product satisfies required quality expectations. In this paper, by using
a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN), we try to construct a prediction model based on relationships
elicited from the embedded software development process. On the one hand, according to
a characteristic of embedded software development, we especially propose to classify test and
debug activities into two distinct activities on software and hardware. Then we call the proposed
model the BBN for an embedded software development process. On the other hand, we define
the BBN for a general software development process to be a model which does not consider
this classification of activity, but rather, merges them into a single activity.
Finally, we conducted experimental evaluations by applying these two BBNs to actual project data.
As the results of our experiments show, the BBN for the embedded software development process
is superior to the BBN for the general development process and is applicable effectively for
effective practical use.