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

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is an incredible and innovative opportunity of software development area of software engineering. The F/OSS phenomenon allows the entire Internet community to use its combined programming knowledge, creativity and expertise to develop software solutions, which could render benefits to whole community without involving cost and proprietary issues. The globally distributed F/OSS users and developers contribute in form of bugs identification, feature request, patch submission, translation request etc. These characteristics give a large boost to software 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 in reporting. The relevant defect data has been retrieved from a research collaboratory and used to quantify and analyze the user participation for defect reporting found that among F/OSS projects defect arrival is quite fluctuating and inconsistent but showing an overall downward trend. A large pool of users participates effectively for bug identification in comparison to feature request, patch submission etc.