by Roberto Abreu · Rahul Premraj at IWPSE/EVOL 2009
Communication between developers plays a very central role in team-based software development for a variety of tasks such as coordinating development and maintenance activities, discussing requirements for better comprehension, assessing alternative solutions to complex problems, and like. However, the frequency of communication varies from time to time—sometimes developers exchange more messages with each other than at other times. In this paper, we investigate whether developer communication has any bearing with software quality by examining the relationship between communication frequency and number of bugs injected into the software. The data used for this study is drawn from the bug database, version archive, and mailing lists of the JDT sub-project in ECLIPSE. Our results show a statistically significant positive correlation between communication frequency and number of injected bugs in the software. We also noted that communication levels of key developers in the project do no correlate with number of injected bugs. Moreover, we show that defect prediction models can accommodate social aspects of the development process and potentially deliver more reliable results.
Talk at IWPSE/EVOL ’09
Reference
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[2009,inproceedings] bibtexR. Abreu and R. Premraj, "How Developer Communication Frequency Relates to Bug Introducing Changes," in EVOL/IWPSE ’09: Procs. of the Joint ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution (EVOL) and International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (to appear), Amsterdam, NL, 2009.
@inproceedings{abreu:iwpse:2009, Address = {Amsterdam, NL},
Author = {Abreu, Roberto and Premraj, Rahul},
Booktitle = {EVOL/IWPSE '09: Procs. of the Joint ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution (EVOL) and International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (to appear)},
Title = {How Developer Communication Frequency Relates to Bug Introducing Changes},
Year = {2009}
}
Nice paper guys!
did you consider splitting the bugs by severity/priority to see if there is a connection?
[Reply]
Rahul Premraj Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Thanks for the comment Adrian. That may be interesting to look into too (and I’ll do), but we both know that severity and priority information in bug databases are often not reliable.
[Reply]