On Relating Technical, Social Factors, and the Introduction of Bugs

Abstract

As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. Consequently, making it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with harmful contributions. Collaborative environments like GitHub provide a rich source of data on developers' contribution, which can be used to extract information on technical (e.g., developers' experience) and social (e.g., interactions among developers) factors related to developers. Recent studies analyzed the influence of these factors on different activities of the software development. However, there is still little knowledge on the relation between these factors

Underproduction: An Approach for Measuring Risk in Open Source Software

“…The process of building and maintaining software is often collaborative and social, including not only code but code comments, commit messages, pull requests, and code reviews, as well as bug reporting, issue discussing, and shared problemsolving [24]. Non-code trace data may include signals of technical debt [25], signs that a given code commit contains bugs [26], or serve as indicators of committed developers, a high-quality software project, or a healthy, sustainable project community [27,28,29]. Prior research has found that digital trace data capturing online community activity can provide significant insight into the study of software [27].…”

Exploring the Social Aspects of Design Decay

“…The relationship between social aspects and design decay has not been studied so far. In fact, most of the previous studies focus on investigating the relations of social aspects with code review [77,76], post-release defects [9,26,18], pull-request acceptance [10,59] or software vulnerabilities [42]. Despite this vast body of knowledge, as aforementioned, the literature still lacks empirical evidence about the influence of different social aspects on design decay.…”

“…Relation of social aspects with quality. Regarding the relation of social aspects with software quality, we found some studies that investigate how social aspects are related with defects [9,11,18]. Falcão et al [18] investigated the relationship between social, technical factors, and the introduction of defects.…”

“…Regarding the relation of social aspects with software quality, we found some studies that investigate how social aspects are related with defects [9,11,18]. Falcão et al [18] investigated the relationship between social, technical factors, and the introduction of defects. The authors identified that both social and technical factors can discriminate between buggy and clean commits, such as ownership level of developers' commit, and social influence.…”

“…Prior works either investigate technical aspects of design decay [17,47,27] or confirms the high frequency of design discussions in pull-based software development [75,57]. Studies of social aspects focus on investigating their relations with post-release defects [9,26,18], pull request acceptance [10,59], and software vulnerabilities [42]. Despite this vast body of knowledge, no study has performed a retrospective investigation on the relationship between key social aspects in pull-based development and design decay.…”