An analysis method for improving a bug modification process in open source software development

Abstract

As open source software products have evolved over time to satisfy a variety of demands from increasing users, they have become large and complex in general. Open source developers often face with challenges in fixing a considerable amount of bugs which are reported into a bug tracking system on a daily basis. As a result, the mean time to resolve bugs has been protracted in these days. In order to reduce the mean time to resolve bugs, managers/leaders of open source projects need to identify and understand the bottleneck of a bug modification process in their own projects. In this paper, we propose an analysis method which represents a bug modification process using a bug tracking system as a state transition diagram and then calculates the amount of time required to transit between states. We have conducted a case study using Firefox and Apache project data to confirm the usefulness of the analysis method. From the results of the case study, we have found that the method helped to reveal that both of the projects took a lot of time to verify results of bug modifications by developers. Copyright 2009 ACM.