UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPER PARTICIPATION IN BUG FIX PROCESS

Prediction of the bug fix time in open source softwares is a challenging job. A software bug consists of many attributes that define the characteristics of the bug. Some of the attributes get filled at the time of reporting and some are? at the time of bug fixing. In this paper, 836 bug reports of two products namely Thunderbird and Webtools of Mozilla open source project have been considered. In? bug report, we see that there is no linear relationship among the bug attributes namely bug fix time, developers, cc count and severity. This paper has analyzed the interdependence among these attributes through graphical representation.The results conclude that :Case 1. 73% of bugs reported for Webtools are fixed by 17% developers and 61% of bugs are fixed by 14% developers for Thundebird.Case 2. We tried to find a relationship between the time taken by a developer in fixing a bug and the corresponding developer. We also observed that there is a significant variation in bug fixing process, bugs may take 1 day to 4 years in fixing.Case 3. There is no linear relationship between cc count i.e. manpower involved in bug fixing process and bug fix time.Case 4. Maximum number of developers are involved in fixing bugs for major severity class.