A Multi-repository Approach to Study the Topology of Open Source Bugs Communities: Implications for Software and Code Quality

Abstract

 Abstract—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.