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Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?: Tracing Bug-Fixing and Bug-Seeding Committers

Authors:

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona,

Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar,

Andrea CapiluppiAuthors Info & Claims

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes, Volume 3, Issue 2

Pages 23 - 42

https://doi.org/10.4018/jossp.2011040102

Published: 01 April 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.

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Cited By

Wen FNagy CLanza MBavota G(2021)Quick remedy commits and their impact on mining software repositoriesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10051-z27:1Online publication date: 28-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10051-z
Rodríguez-Pérez GZaidman ASerebrenik ARobles GGonzález-Barahona JOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)What if a bug has a different origin?Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3267436(1-4)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3267436
Rodriguez-Perez GRobles GGonzalez-Barahona JTonelli RCounsell SDestefanis GMurgia ATempero E(2017)How much time did it take to notify a bug?Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics10.5555/3106039.3106047(29-35)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3106039.3106047
Show More Cited By

Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?: Tracing Bug-Fixing and Bug-Seeding Committers
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes Volume 3, Issue 2

April 2011

78 pages

ISSN:1942-3926

EISSN:1942-3934

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Publisher

IGI Global

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2011

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Citations

Cited By

Wen FNagy CLanza MBavota G(2021)Quick remedy commits and their impact on mining software repositoriesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10051-z27:1Online publication date: 28-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10051-z
Rodríguez-Pérez GZaidman ASerebrenik ARobles GGonzález-Barahona JOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)What if a bug has a different origin?Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3267436(1-4)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3267436
Rodriguez-Perez GRobles GGonzalez-Barahona JTonelli RCounsell SDestefanis GMurgia ATempero E(2017)How much time did it take to notify a bug?Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics10.5555/3106039.3106047(29-35)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3106039.3106047
Bakar ASultan AZulzalil HDin J(2014)Open Source Software Adaptation in AfricaInternational Journal of Open Source Software and Processes10.4018/ijossp.20140101015:1(1-15)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/ijossp.2014010101
Shokripour RAnvik JKasirun ZZamani SZimmermann TDi Penta MKim S(2013)Why so complicated? simple term filtering and weighting for location-based bug report assignment recommendationProceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.5555/2487085.2487089(2-11)Online publication date: 18-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2487085.2487089

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