Bug report networks: Varieties, strategies, and impacts in an OSS development community

Our empirical research has shown that a predominant structural feature of defect tracking repositories is the evolving "bug report network " (BRN). Community members create BRNs by progressively asserting various formal and informal relationships between bug reports (BRs). In one F/OSS bug repository under study, participants assert two formal relationships (duplications and dependencies) and various informal relationships (like "see also " references). BRNs can be interpreted as (1) information ordering strategies that support collocation of related BRs, decreasing cognitive and organizational effort; (2) sense-making strategies wherein BRNs provide more refined representations of software and work-organization issues; (3) social ordering strategies that rearrange collective relationships among community members. This paper presents findings from an investigation of the nature, extent, and impact of BRNs in one large F/OSS development community. We investigate whether and how specific classes of BRNs influence problem management within the community, and identify several new research questions