The relation between developers’ communication and fix-Inducing changes: An empirical study

Abstract

Background Many open source and industrial projects involve several developers spread around the world and working in different timezones. Such developers usually communicate through mailing lists, issue tracking systems or chats. Lack of adequate communication can create misunderstanding and could possibly cause the introduction of bugs.Aim This paper aims at investigating the relation between the bug inducing and fixing phenomenon and the lack of written communication between committers in open source projects.Method We performed an empirical study that involved four open source projects, namely Apache httpd, GNU GCC, Mozilla Firefox, and Xorg Xserver. For each project change history data, issue tracker comments, mailing list messages, and chat logs were analyzed in order to answer four research questions about the relation between the social importance and communication level of committers and their proneness to induce bug fixes.Results and implications Results indicate that the majority of bugs are fixed by committers who did not induce them, a smaller but substantial percentage of bugs is fixed by committers that induced them, and very few bugs are fixed by committers that were not directly involved in previous changes on the same files of the fix. More importantly, committers inducing fixes tend to have a lower level of communication between each other than that of other committers. This last finding suggests that increasing the level of communication between fix-inducing committers could reduce the number of fixes induced in a software project.