Do More Experienced Developers Introduce Fewer Bugs?

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2012-09-13 12:03

Title	Do More Experienced Developers Introduce Fewer Bugs?
Publication Type	Conference Proceedings
Year of Publication	2012
Authors	Izquierdo-Cortázar, D, Robles, G, González-Barahona, JM
Refereed Designation	Refereed
Secondary Title	IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology 378 (OSS 2012)
Volume	378
Pagination	268-273
Date Published	09/2012
Publisher	IFIP AICT, Springer
Keywords	mercurial, mozilla, scm, source code analysis
Abstract	Developer experience is a common matter of study in the software maintenance and evolution research literature. However it is still not well understood if less experienced developers are more prone to introduce errors in the source code than their more experienced colleagues. This paper aims to study the relationships between experience and the bug introduction ratio using the Mozilla community as case of study. As results, statistical differences among developers with different levels of experience has not been observed, when the expected result would have been the opposite1.
Notes	"Some Mozilla Foundation projects have been the selected case of study for this paper. The analysis is based on the Mercurial repository which offers a list of repositories that can be easily cloned. As a summary, 19 projects were analyzed, with more than 100,000 commits, more than 2,500 authors and around 4 years of history up to June 2011."
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