Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Information needs in bug reports: improving cooperation between developers and users
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
"Not my bug!" and other reasons for software bug report reassignments
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
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Results from a study of a global Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) development organization show how distributed information practices contribute to the management of software problems. The study addressed these questions: (1) How do F/OSS development communities manage software problems? (2) What varieties of information and activity occur as part of software problem management? And (3) How are information, activity, and social order related in software problem management? A systematic random sample of 385 bug reports was drawn from a collection more than 182,000 bug reports held in this community's bug report repository, with additional bug reports selected from the repository using theoretical sampling. The bug reports were treated as texts; content analytic and grounded theory procedures were used to develop categories of phenomena and new and revised theoretical constructs. The analysis of the data was informed by previous research into human information behavior, negotiation, collaboration, social and information contexts, software engineering, and sensemaking to provide insights into how this large, distributed organization utilizes information to produce successful, high-quality software. Contributions from this project include the first detailed, empirically grounded description of the information practices used by a distributed F/OSS development organization to manage software problems, including the first description of a fundamental information object, the bug report network; clearly drawn distinctions between the information management work necessary to support the community's software problem management goals and the work that directly resolves software problems; identification of the processes and social arrangements that enable this community's distributed collective software problem management practices; explication of software problem management as a distributed, communal sensemaking enterprise; description of the layers of context and nested processes necessary to support distributed, information-intensive work; and the description of a new class of human information behavior, distributed collective information practices. Throughout, the ways in which information, activity, social order, context, and process are mutually constitutive are identified and explained. Bug report networks are used as a primary example of how activity leads to new forms of information, re-orders existing information, affects social order, and contributes to the community's efforts to bring problematic situations to closure.