Defects in Open Source Software: The Role of Online Forums

Free and open source software is gaining popularity at an unprecedented rate of growth. Organizations despite some concerns about the quality have been using them for various purposes. One of the biggest concerns about free and open source software is post release software defects and their fixing. Many believe that there is no appropriate support available to fix the bugs. On the contrary some believe that due to the active involvement of internet user in online forums, they become a major source of communicating the identification and fixing of defects in open source software. The research model of this empirical investigation establishes and studies the relationship between open source software defects and online public forums. The results of this empirical study provide evidence about the realities of software defects myths of open source software. We used a dataset consist of 616 open source software projects covering a broad range of categories to study the research model of this investigation. The results of this investigation show that online forums play a significant role identifying and fixing the defects in open source software.

Authors:

• Faheem Ahmed
• Piers Campbell
• Ahmad Jaffar
• Luiz Capretz

Keywords:

• About Open source software
• software engineering
• software defect management
• empirical software engineering.

References:

[1] T. O-Reilly, Lessons from open-source software development,
Communications of ACM, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 32-37, 1999
[2] T. Koponen, Life-cycle of the defects in Open Source Software Projects,
Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Open Source
Systems, Italy, 2006.
[3] Gacek, C. and Arief, B., The many meanings of open source, IEEE
Software, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 34-40, 2004.
[4] C horng-Guang W., James H. G., Clifford E. Y, An empirical analysis of
open source software developers' motivations and continuance
intentions, Information & Management, Vol. 44, No. 3,pp. 253-262,
2007.
[5] P. Vixie, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution,
O-Reilly & Associates, 1999, pp. 91-100.
[6] R. Glass Is open source software more reliable? An elusive answer. The
Software Practitioner 11 (6), 2001.
[7] M. Aberdour. Achieving quality in open-source software IEEE
Software, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 58-64, 2007.
[8] P. Wayner, Free For All, HarperCollins, New York (2000).
[9] K. Crowston & B. Scozzi Bug Fixing Practices within Free/Libre Open
Source Software Development Teams, , Journal of Database
Management, Volume 19, Issue 2, 2008.
[10] D. Cubranic, K. Booth, Coordinating open-source software
development. In: Proceedings of IEEE 8th International Workshop on
Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises. pp.
61-69, 1999
[11] A. Mockus, R. Fielding, J. Herbsleb, A case study of open source
software development: the Apache server. In: The 22nd International
Conference on Software Engineering. pp. 263-272, 2000.