Social interactions around cross-system bug fixings

Submitted by msquire on Tue, 2011-12-20 10:45

Title	Social interactions around cross-system bug fixings
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2011
Authors	Cerulo, L, Cimitile, M, Di Penta, M, Canfora, G
Tertiary Authors	van Deursen, A, Xie, T, Zimmermann, T
Secondary Title	Proceedings of the 8th working conference on Mining software repositories - MSR '11
Pagination	143-152
Date Published	05/2011
Publisher	ACM Press
Place Published	New York, New York, USA
ISBN Number	9781450305747
Keywords	bug 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"
DOI	10.1145/1985441.1985463
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