Evaluating User Participation in Defect Reporting Among Free/Open Source Software Projects

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is an innovative opportunity of software development area of software engineering. The F/OSS phenomenon allows the entire Internet community to use its programming knowledge, creativity and expertise to develop software solutions, which could render to whole community without involving proprietary issues. The globally distributed and developers contribute in form of bugs F/OSS users identification, feature request, patch submission, translation request etc. These characteristics give a large boost to development resulting in more effective software production, with true field testing and fast defect The present paper delves into a multi-case study of F/ OSS projects to evaluate user participation reporting. The relevant defect data has been retrieved from a research collaboratory and used to analyze the user participation for defect quantify and reporting. It is found that among F/OSS projects defect arrival fluctuating and inconsistent but showing an downward trend. A large pool of users participates effectively for bug identification in comparison to