#BUGZILLA 5.0 DEMO SOFTWARE#
As with collaboration generally, software development requires coordination for achieving goals, whether through formal or informal mechanisms. The large volume of reported CRs and associated noise also has repercussions for the rest of the OSS team, especially for those who are responsible for “driving” or managing a project. Thus, increased noise is a downside of the openness of OSS development.
For example, in their analysis of the Apache server OSS development community, Mockus and colleagues found that of 3,060 individuals who submitted a total of 3,975 CRs, a subset of 458 individuals submitted the 591 CRs that were addressed in subsequent code releases.
Both the increase in volume and in noise result in part from the large number of participants in OSS projects, many of whom are involved only marginally and therefore may not be attuned to the realities of the project. This high level of noise in change requests taxes an already overburdened group that does “triage:” vetting each CR and assigning it to someone for resolution. Significantly, their analysis showed that 36% of the reported CRs were later classified as inappropriate: they could not be replicated, they were duplicates, or they were marked ‘out of scope’ and therefore not addressed by the development team. For example, Anvik and colleagues reported that almost 3500 CRs were logged in the Eclipse open source project in one four- month period, or almost 30 per day. One widely reported new problem, part of the motivation for this paper, stems from the large number of CRs that can be generated in OSS development projects.
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