{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,28]],"date-time":"2025-09-28T04:15:35Z","timestamp":1759032935074},"reference-count":28,"publisher":"IGI Global","issue":"2","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2011,4,1]]},"abstract":"<p>The process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.<\/p>","DOI":"10.4018\/jossp.2011040102","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,13]],"date-time":"2012-01-13T15:56:53Z","timestamp":1326470213000},"page":"23-42","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Are Developers Fixing Their Own Bugs?"],"prefix":"10.4018","volume":"3","author":[{"given":"Daniel","family":"Izquierdo-Cortazar","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain"}]},{"given":"Andrea","family":"Capiluppi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of East London, UK"}]},{"given":"Jesus M..","family":"Gonzalez-Barahona","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain"}]}],"member":"2432","reference":[{"key":"jossp.2011040102-0","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Adams, P. J., Capiluppi, A., & Boldyreff, C. (2009). Coordination and productivity issues in free software: The role of brooks\u2019 law. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (pp. 319-328). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSM.2009.5306308"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Canfora, G., Cerulo, L., & Penta, M. D. (2007). Identifying changed source code lines from version repositories. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (p. 14). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.","DOI":"10.1109\/MSR.2007.14"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-2","unstructured":"Capiluppi, A., Baravalle, A., & Heap, N. (2010). Open standards and e-learning: the role of open source software. 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Using software trails to reconstruct the evolution of software: Research articles. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice\u2014Analyzing the Evolution of Large-Scale Software, 16(6), 367-384.","DOI":"10.1002\/smr.301"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-7","author":"R.Goldman","year":"2004","journal-title":"Innovation happens elsewhere: How and why a company should participate in open source"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Guo, P. J., Zimmermann, T., Nagappan, N., & Murphy, B. (2010). Characterizing and predicting which bugs get fixed: an empirical study of Microsoft windows. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM\/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 495-504). New York, NY: ACM.","DOI":"10.1145\/1806799.1806871"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hao-Yun Huang, Q. L., & Panchal, J. H. (2010). Analysis of the structure and evolution of an open-source community. 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Who can help me with this source code change? In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (pp. 157-166). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSM.2008.4658064"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-13","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TSE.2007.70773"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-14","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s10664-008-9086-4"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ma, D., Schuler, D., Zimmermann, T., & Sillito, J. (2009). Expert recommendation with usage expertise. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (pp. 535-538). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSM.2009.5306386"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-16","author":"D.MacKenzie","year":"2002","journal-title":"Comparing and merging files with GNU diff and patch"},{"key":"jossp.2011040102-17","unstructured":"MacLean, A. C., Pratt, L. J., Krein, J. L., & Knutson, C. D. (2010). 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