Influence of Technical and Social Factors for Introducing Bugs
This work addresses bug prediction for developers and code reviewers in open-source software, but it is incremental as it builds on prior research linking factors to contribution success.
The study investigated how technical and social factors influence bug introduction in 14 GitHub projects, finding that technical factors consistently affect bugs while social factors show inconclusive influence due to data limitations.
[This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to updated research available on arXiv (arXiv:1811.01918)] As the modern open-source paradigm makes it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keep increasing. This growth in the amount of developers makes it more difficult to deal with harmful contributions. Recent researches have found that technical and social factors can predict the success of contributions to open-source projects on GitHub. However, these researches do not study the relation between these factors with the introduction of bugs. Our study aims at investigating the influence of technical (such as, developers' experience) and social (such as, number of followers) factors on the introduction of bugs, using information from 14 projects hosted on GitHub. Understanding the influence of these factors may be useful to developers, code reviewers and researchers. For instance, code reviewers may want to double check commits from developers that present bug-related factors. We found that technical factors have a consistent influence in the introduction of bugs. On the other hand, social factors present signs of influence in bug introduction that would require more data to be properly evaluated. Moreover, we found that perils present in the mining of GitHub may impact the factors results.