TY - JOUR
T1 - File-level socio-technical congruence and its relationship with bug proneness in OSS projects
AU - Zhang, Weiqiang
AU - Cheung, Shing Chi
AU - Chen, Zhenyu
AU - Zhou, Yuming
AU - Luo, Bin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2019/10
Y1 - 2019/10
N2 - Coordination is important in software development. Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) is proposed to measure the match between coordination requirements and actual coordination activities. The previous work of Cataldo et al. computes STC in commercial projects and finds it related to software failures. In this paper, we study the relationship between file-level STC and bug proneness in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We apply the fundamental STC framework to the OSS data setting and present a method of computing file-level STC based on our available data. We also propose a derivative STC metric called Missing Developer Links (MDL), which is to measure the amount of coordination breakdowns. In our empirical analysis on five OSS projects, we find that MDL is more related to bug proneness than STC. Furthermore, STC or MDL can be computed based on different types of file networks and developer networks, and we find out the best file network and the best developer network via an empirical study. We also evaluate the usefulness of STC or MDL metrics in bug prediction. This work is promising to help detect coordination issues in OSS projects.
AB - Coordination is important in software development. Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) is proposed to measure the match between coordination requirements and actual coordination activities. The previous work of Cataldo et al. computes STC in commercial projects and finds it related to software failures. In this paper, we study the relationship between file-level STC and bug proneness in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We apply the fundamental STC framework to the OSS data setting and present a method of computing file-level STC based on our available data. We also propose a derivative STC metric called Missing Developer Links (MDL), which is to measure the amount of coordination breakdowns. In our empirical analysis on five OSS projects, we find that MDL is more related to bug proneness than STC. Furthermore, STC or MDL can be computed based on different types of file networks and developer networks, and we find out the best file network and the best developer network via an empirical study. We also evaluate the usefulness of STC or MDL metrics in bug prediction. This work is promising to help detect coordination issues in OSS projects.
KW - Coordination breakdown
KW - Developer network
KW - Open source software
KW - Socio-technical congruence
KW - Software quality
UR - https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000483658000002
UR - https://openalex.org/W2946376249
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85066732591
U2 - 10.1016/j.jss.2019.05.030
DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2019.05.030
M3 - Journal Article
SN - 0164-1212
VL - 156
SP - 21
EP - 40
JO - Journal of Systems and Software
JF - Journal of Systems and Software
ER -