Good or Bad Committers? A Case Study of Committers' Cautiousness and the Consequences on the Bug Fixing Process in the Eclipse Project

There are many roles to play in the bug fixing process in open source software development. A developer called ``Committer'', who has a permission to submit a patch into software repository, plays a major role in this process and hold a key to the successfulness of the project. In this work, we have observed each committer activities from the Eclipse-Platform bug tracking system and version archives. Despite the importance of committer's activities, we suspected that sometimes committers can make mistakes, which have negative consequences to the bug fixing process. Our research focus on studying the consequences of each committer's activities to this process. We collected each committer's historical data and evaluated each of them by comparing the more cautiousness to less cautiousness committers. Then we looked deeper into each committer's characteristics to see the reasons why some committers tend to make mistakes more than the others. From our results, we would like to make a humbly suggestion to the OSS's committers to be aware of their importance to the projects and be cautious before doing their jobs.