The Impact of Formal QA Practices on FLOSS Communities – The Case of Mozilla

The number of FLOSS projects that include a QA step in the development model is increasing which suggests that a new layer may be emerging in the classic “onion model”. This change might affect the information flow within projects and implicitly their sustainability. Communities, the essential resource of FLOSS projects, have been extensively studied but questions concerning QA remain. This paper takes a step towards answering such questions by analyzing QA mailing lists and issue tracker data for the Mozilla group of projects. Because the Bugzilla data set contains over half a million bugs, data processing and analysis is a considerable challenge for this research. The provisional conclusions are that QA activity may not be increasing steadily over time but is dependent on other factors and that the QA team and other groups of contributors form a highly connected network that doesn’t contain isolates.