Empirical Analysis of the Bug Fixing Process in Open Source Projects

Monitoring the performance of processes is often considered critical in classic engineering fields. However, in the area of software engineering (and especially in the Open Source context) it seems that the literature has not yet taken into consideration the problem of identifying the process characteristics and performance of debugging. The aim of this paper is the identification of the performance characteristics of the bug fixing process of Open Source applications, focusing on continuity and efficiency indicators. The importance of such indicators is even more relevant today, since Open Source software is now adopted also in many business contexts. We have analyzed the debugging process of 9 active and popular Open Source projects, collecting a dataset comprising more than 65,000 closed bugs. Results have highlighted four types of bug fixing processes that can be distinguished by considering temporal continuity and efficiency dimensions.