Evaluating the Post-Delivery Fault Reporting and Correction Process in Closed-Source and Open-Source Software

Post-delivery fault reporting and correction are important activities in the software maintenance process. It is worthwhile to study these activities in order to understand the difference between open-source and closed-source software products from the maintenance perspective. This paper proposes three metrics to evaluate the post-delivery fault reporting and correction process, the average fault hidden time, the average fault pending time, and the average fault correction time. An empirical study is further performed to compare the fault correction processes of NASA Ames (closed-source) projects and three open-source projects: Apache Tomcat, Apache Ant, and Gnome Panel.