Good or Bad Committers? —— A Case Study of Committer's Activities on the Eclipse's Bug Fixing Process

Abstract

There are many roles to play in the bug fixing process in open source software development. A developer called “Committer”, who has a permission to submit a patch into a software repository, plays a major role in this process and holds a key to the successfulness of the project. Despite the importance of committer's activities, we suspect that sometimes committers can make mistakes which have some consequences to the bug fixing process (e.g., reopened bugs after bug fixing). Our research focuses on studying the consequences of each committer's activities to this process. We collected each committer's historical data from the Eclipse-Platform's bug tracking system and version control system and evaluated their activities using bug status in the bug tracking system and commit log in the version control system. Then we looked deeper into each committer's characteristics to see the reasons why some committers tend to make mistakes more than the others.