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Different Bug Fixing Regimes? A Preliminary Case for Superbugs

2007; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-0-387-72486-7_23

1861-2288

Jean‐Michel Dalle, Matthijs den Besten,

Software Engineering Techniques and Practices

The paper investigates the processes by which bugs are fixed in open-source software projects. Focusing on Mozilla and combining data from both its bug tracker (Bugzilla) and from its CVS, we suggest that: a) Some bugs resist beyond the first patch applied to the main branch of the source code in relation to them, which we denote as superbugs; b) There might exist different bug fixing regimes; c) priority and severity flags as defined in bug repositories are not optimized for superbugs and might lead to a involuntary side effects; d) The survival time of superbugs is influenced by the nature of the discussions within Bugzilla, by bug dependencies and by the provision of contextual elements.