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

Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain), Andrea Capiluppi (University of East London, UK) and Jesus M.. Gonzalez-Barahona (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)

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DOI: 10.4018/jossp.2011040102, ISSN: 1942-3926, EISSN: 1942-3934

Source title: International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP)

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MLA

Izquierdo-Cortazar, Daniel, Andrea Capiluppi and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona. "Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?: Tracing Bug-Fixing and Bug-Seeding Committers." IJOSSP 3.2 (2011): 23-42. Web. 21 May. 2012. doi:10.4018/jossp.2011040102

APA

Izquierdo-Cortazar, D., Capiluppi, A., & Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M. (2011). Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?: Tracing Bug-Fixing and Bug-Seeding Committers. International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP), 3(2), 23-42. doi:10.4018/jossp.2011040102

Chicago

Izquierdo-Cortazar, Daniel, Andrea Capiluppi and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona. "Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?: Tracing Bug-Fixing and Bug-Seeding Committers," International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP) 3 (2011): 2, accessed (May 21, 2012), doi:10.4018/jossp.2011040102

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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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