Are the Changes Induced by the Defect Reports in the Open Source Software Maintenance?

In this paper we study defect management and version management systems that are used in many Open Source software projects to manage development and maintenance processes. Usually, those systems are not integrated together even there is a conceptual relation between stored information. Our purpose was to create an approach that could be used to analyze relations between changes and defects. To evaluate our approach we analyzed two case studies, Apache HTTP Server and Mozilla Firefox that are well-know examples of Open Source software. Consequently, we found that only a small percentage of changes in the source code of the Apache were initiated by defect reports. However, in Mozilla over 60 percent of changes were initiated by defect reports. Furthermore, we found that developers which had made fewer changes were more likely to do changes that were initiated by defect.

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