Software Problem Management as Information Management in a F/OSS Development Community

Bug reports created by a large, successful open source software development community show that software problem management (SWPM) is first of all information management and secondarily a problem solving activity. Solving software problems occurs only after a bug report, a first-class information object, has been created and “triaged” by community members. One predominant structural feature of defect tracking repositories is the evolving "bug report network" (BRN). Community members create BRNs by progressively asserting various formal and informal relationships between bug reports (BRs). In one F/OSS bug repository under study, participants assert two formal relationships (duplications and dependencies) and various informal relationships (like "see also" references). BRNs can be interpreted as (1) information ordering strategies that support collocation of related BRs, decreasing cognitive and organizational effort; (2) sense-making strategies wherein BRNs provide mor...