Abstract-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 EclipsePlatform 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.

Anakorn JONGYINDEE †a) , Student Member, Masao OHIRA † †b) , Akinori IHARA † † †c) , and Ken-ichi MATSUMOTO † † †d) , Members SUMMARYThere 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 a software repository, plays a major role in this process and holds a key to the successfulness of the project. Despite the importance of committer's activities, we suspect that sometimes committers can make mistakes which have some consequences to the bug fixing process (e.g., reopened bugs after bug fixing). Our research focuses on studying the consequences of each committer's activities to this process. We collected each committer's historical data from the EclipsePlatform's bug tracking system and version control system and evaluated their activities using bug status in the bug tracking system and commit log in the version control system. Then we looked deeper into each committer's characteristics to see the reasons why some committers tend to make mistakes more than the others. IntroductionOpen Source Software (OSS) has been attracting a great deal of attention from a variety of areas as an alternative way of software use and development. As OSS has become more common and popular among us, however, OSS projects are facing with a big challenge on their quality assurance activities. Due to the growing user base, especially large OSS projects such as the Mozilla and Eclipse projects, they have receives a considerable amount of bug reports from the users on a daily basis [1] (e.g., several hundred bug reports are posted to the Bugzilla [2] database of the Mozilla project every day). OSS projects require finding an effective way of dealing with a large number of bug reports. In an OSS project, a bug is fixed through the bug fixing process [3] which starts from the process where the bug is reported in the project until patches for fixing the bug are submitted into a software repository. Each bug report in this process is passed through one or more developers who play different roles before it is closed.

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