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FSE 2011

Don't touch my code!: examining the effects of ownership on software quality

Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy, Harald C. Gall, Premkumar T. Devanbu

PDFDOI 10.1145/2025113.2025119dblp

Abstract

Ownership is a key aspect of large-scale software development. We examine the relationship between different ownership measures and software failures in two large software projects: Windows Vista and Windows 7. We find that in all cases, measures of ownership such as the number of low-expertise developers, and the proportion of ownership for the top owner have a relationship with both pre-release faults and post-release failures. We also empirically identify reasons that low-expertise developers make changes to components and show that the removal of low-expertise contributions dramatically decreases the performance of contribution based defect prediction. Finally we provide recommendations for source code change policies and utilization of resources such as code inspections based on our results.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{Bird-al:FSE11,
  author    = {Christian Bird and
               Nachiappan Nagappan and
               Brendan Murphy and
               Harald C. Gall and
               Premkumar T. Devanbu},
  title     = {Don't touch my code!: examining the effects of ownership on software quality},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  pages     = {4--14},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2011},
}

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