Exploring the Maintenance Process through the Defect Management in the Open Source Projects - Four Case Studies

While Open Source Software are becoming evermore widespread and used these days, their maintenance is coming important issue. Earlier studies have shown that defect and version management systems are rich and valuable sources for evaluation of maintenance but they have not studied the use of separate management system for support and feature request. Therefore, in this research we study defect reports, support and feature requests of Open Source Software projects through four case studies from SourceForge. Results showed that most of the case studies used actively those systems but discussion forums were even more active. Although reports and requests were submitted, most of them did not cause any changes or further actions because they were closed shortly as duplicates, invalid or without any resolution.