The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories

[Tobias Mueller <muelli auftrags-killer org>]

Hey folks,

during my research I came across the following paper which might be in
your interest.

Here's the abstract:
Every bug has a story behind it. The people that discover and resolve it
need to coordinate, to get information from documents, tools, or other
people, and to navigate through issues of accountability, ownership, and
organizational structure. This paper reports on a field study of
coordination activities around bug fixing that used a combination of
case study research and a survey of software professionals. Results show
that the histories of even simple bugs are strongly dependent on social,
organizational, and technical knowledge that cannot be solely extracted
through automation of electronic repositories, and that such automation
provides incomplete and often erroneous accounts of coordination. The
paper uses rich bug histories and survey results to identify common bug
fixing coordination patterns and to provide implications for tool
designers and researchers of coordination in software development.


File: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/81022/secret.pdf
IEEE: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=5070530

Happy reading,
  Tobi