Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Innovation Happens Elsewhere: How and Why a Company Should Participate in Open Source
Innovation Happens Elsewhere: How and Why a Company Should Participate in Open Source
Empirical Software Engineering
Using software trails to reconstruct the evolution of software: Research Articles
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Analyzing the Evolution of Large-Scale Software
MSR '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Mining version archives for co-changed lines
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Beyond source code: the importance of other artifacts in software development (a case study)
Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue: Selected papers from the 4th source code analysis and manipulation (SCAM 2004) workshop
What do large commits tell us?: a taxonomical study of large commits
Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories
Classifying Software Changes: Clean or Buggy?
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Characterizing and predicting which bugs get fixed: an empirical study of Microsoft Windows
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
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The process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.