A Point Process Approach of Bug Fixing Analysis in Open Source Software Projects

One of open-source software (OSS) is that it can be used for a long term by repeating version-up iteratively in the operational phase, so that OSS possesses a different software bug detection and correction profiles from the closed source software (CSS) products. More specifically, the software bug fixing process of OSS can be considered to show effects of the long-term operation and/or periodicity due to the multiple version-up procedures, in addition to the common reliability growth phenomenon observed in the relatively short-term software testing. In this article we propose a stochastic point process approach to represent the long-term effect and the periodicity effect of OSS with the actual OSS bug fixing data. By conducting the reliability analysis of OSS, it is possible to assess the operational reliability of OSS quantitatively and to share the published quality indicators of OSS by the whole OSS community.