Social interactions around cross-system bug fixings

TitleSocial interactions around cross-system bug fixings
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsCerulo, L, Cimitile, M, Di Penta, M, Canfora, G
Tertiary Authorsvan Deursen, A, Xie, T, Zimmermann, T
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 8th working conference on Mining software repositories - MSR '11
Pagination143-152
Date Published05/2011
PublisherACM Press
Place PublishedNew York, New York, USA
ISBN Number9781450305747
Keywordsbug fixing, bug tracking system, committers, email, email archives, freebsd, mailing list, openbsd
Abstract

Cross-system bug fixing propagation is frequent among systems having similar characteristics, using a common framework, or, in general, systems with cloned source code fragments. While previous studies showed that clones tend to be properly maintained within a single system, very little is known about cross-system bug management.

This paper describes an approach to mine explicitly documented cross-system bug fixings, and to relate their occurrences to social characteristics of contributors discussing through the project mailing lists--e.g., degree, betweenness, and brokerage--as well as to the contributors' activity on source code.

The paper reports results of an empirical study carried out on FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernels. The study shows that the phenomenon of cross-system bug fixing between these two projects occurs often, despite the limited overlap of contributors. The study also shows that cross-system bug fixings mainly involve contributors with the highest degree, betweenness and brokerage level, as well as contributors that change the source code more than others.

Notes

"We rely on information stored in versioning database and mailing lists of both systems and develop methods to reconstruct and integrate different historical database"

DOI10.1145/1985441.1985463
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