Software problem management as information management in a F/OSS development community (original) (raw)
Related papers
Communication, collaboration, and bugs: The social nature of issue tracking in software engineering
2010
ABSTRACT Issue tracking systems help organizations manage issue reporting, assignment, tracking, resolution, and archiving. Traditionally, it is the Software Engineering community that researches issue tracking systems, where software defects are reported and tracked as 'bug reports' within an archival database. Yet issue tracking is fundamentally a social process and, as such, it is important to understand the design and use of issue tracking systems from that perspective.
Categorizing bugs with social networks: a case study on four open source software communities
2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2013
Efficient bug triaging procedures are an important precondition for successful collaborative software engineering projects. Triaging bugs can become a laborious task particularly in open source software (OSS) projects with a large base of comparably inexperienced parttime contributors. In this paper, we propose an efficient and practical method to identify valid bug reports which a) refer to an actual software bug, b) are not duplicates and c) contain enough information to be processed right away. Our classification is based on nine measures to quantify the social embeddedness of bug reporters in the collaboration network. We demonstrate its applicability in a case study, using a comprehensive data set of more than 700, 000 bug reports obtained from the Bugzilla installation of four major OSS communities, for a period of more than ten years. For those projects that exhibit the lowest fraction of valid bug reports, we find that the bug reporters' position in the collaboration network is a strong indicator for the quality of bug reports. Based on this finding, we develop an automated classification scheme that can easily be integrated into bug tracking platforms and analyze its performance in the considered OSS communities. A support vector machine (SVM) to identify valid bug reports based on the nine measures yields a precision of up to 90.3% with an associated recall of 38.9%. With this, we significantly improve the results obtained in previous case studies for an automated early identification of bugs that are eventually fixed. Furthermore, our study highlights the potential of using quantitative measures of social organization in collaborative software engineering. It also opens a broad perspective for the integration of social awareness in the design of support infrastructures.
2005
Abstract Publicly accessible bug report repositories maintained by free/open source development communities provide vast stores of data about distributed software problem management (SWPM). Qualitative analysis of individual bug reports, texts that record community responses to reported software problems, shows how this distributed community uses its SWPM process to manage software quality. We focus on the role of one basic social process, negotiation, in SWPM.
International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, 2013
Businesses and research establishments are increasingly turning to Free and Open Source software (FOSS) as a means to lower software development, acquisition, and deployment costs. However, software quality and security remains key stumbling blocks to full scale FOSS adoption and deployment. Yet improvement in the quality and security of FOSS depends on the rate at which a community of volunteers report and fix bugs. The aim of this research is to understand the community governance of the bug reporting and fixing process. We link data obtained from bug tracking systems, source code repositories, and mailing lists and applied various metrics to investigate the dynamics of bug communities in 285 projects. The results of our study show that the identity of bug reporters or fixers, the size of the bug community and code are key factors in ensuring quality software. The implications of these findings for bugs governance, software and code quality, empirical research difficulties, and future research directions are also discussed.
2009
According to the now widely accepted "onion-model" of the organization of open source software development, an open source project typically relies on a core of developers that is assisted by a larger periphery of users. But what does the role of the periphery consist of? Raymond's Linus's Law which states that "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" suggests at least one important function: the detection of defects. Yet, what are the ways through which core and periphery interact with each other? With the help of text-mining methods, we study the treatment of bugs that affected the Firefox Internet browser as reflected in the discussions and actions recorded in Mozilla's issue tracking system Bugzilla. We find various patterns in the modes of interactions between core and peripheral members of the community. For instance, core members seem to engage more frequently with the periphery when the latter proposes a solution (a patch). This leads us to conclude that Alan Cox's dictum "show me the code", perhaps even more than Linus's law, seems to be the dominant rule that governs the development of software like Firefox.
2006
While Open Source Software are becoming evermore widespread and used these days, their maintenance is coming important issue. Earlier studies have shown that defect and version management systems are rich and valuable sources for evaluation of maintenance but they have not studied the use of separate management system for support and feature request. Therefore, in this research we study defect reports, support and feature requests of Open Source Software projects through four case studies from SourceForge. Results showed that most of the case studies used actively those systems but discussion forums were even more active. Although reports and requests were submitted, most of them did not cause any changes or further actions because they were closed shortly as duplicates, invalid or without any resolution.
Studying Multifaceted Collaboration of OSS Developers and its Impact on their Bug Fixing Performance
2019
Developers often collaborate to fix complex bugs, even in open source software systems (OSS) where collaboration largely occurs through discussions in the bug tracker. The implicit Developer Social Networks (DSN) are created as a result of these discussions. Past research has investigated the usefulness of such DSNs in addressing many Software Engineering problems (e.g. Defect Prediction, Evolution of collaboration patterns, etc.). However, the multifaceted nature of DSNs constructed from bug reports data has been ignored in most of the past studies. That is, in most of the past studies, the link among developers exist only if they comment on the same bug report while in reality, the developers may be connected indirectly (e.g. pair of developers are connected even if they comment on two different bug reports which are associated with the same software component). Such unexplored relationships among developers can be used in defining new measures to identify important developers in ...