After readying The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories, by Jorge Aranda and Gina Venolia, The paper uses rich bug histories and survey results to identify common bug fixing coordination patterns and to provide implications for tool designers and researchers of coordination in software development.
Research on coordination of software professionals faces the problem of having too many possible events and variables to observe and too limited observation and analysis resources. The need to be selective permeates our data collection and analysis strategies.
There is the studies of root cause analyses, which explore a number of process failures to uncover and fix their root causes. Which I think its pretty cool.
The goal that they had was in my opinion of most importance, like contextualized, work-item-centric account of coordination in bug fixing tasks.
They also ask really interesting questions to consideration:
How is the process of fixing bugs coordinated in software teams? What is the lifecycle of bugs? What are the most common patterns of coordination involved in this work? How does their resolution play out over time and over the socio-technical network of the teams that work on them?
Lets not forget the levels of data collection and analysis:
- Automated analysis of bug record data
- Automated analysis of electronic conversations and other repositories.
- Human sense-making
- Direct accounts of the history by its
They discovered a number of coordination patterns of bug fixing, which were validated through a survey of software professionals. From an analysis of the underlying purpose of the people that engage in these patterns, we derived eight goals for bug fixing that are useful as a framework to design better tools and practices.
Testing 