How Shallow is a Bug? Why Open Source Communities Shorten the Repair Time of Software Defects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A central tenet of the open source software development methodology is that the community of users and developers is instrumental in improving the quality of software. Using a 10-year longitudinal dataset from the Firefox community, I investigate how the size of a community in terms of bug reporters and software developers, the social networks of developers and the quality of user contributions influence the time needed to repair software defects. The results show that a large open source community in terms of bug reporters reduces the time needed to resolve a defect while the addition of new software developers to an open source community takes away resources to fix bugs and increase the time needed to resolve a defect. In addition, software developers occupying dense network positions need less time to solve a bug. Finally, user contributions are beneficial when bugs are lively discussed but there is no support for the prediction that the experience of the bug reporter or the quality of the bug report reduces the time needed to solve a software defect.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it