Software problem management as information management in a F/OSS development community

Abstract – Bug reports created by a large, successful open source software development community show that software problem management (SWPM) is first of all information management and secondarily a problem solving activity. Solving software problems occurs only after a bug report, a first-class information object, has been created and “triaged” by community members. One 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; and (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 describe how specific classes of BRNs influence problem management within the community, and identify several new research questions. I