How Often do Experts Make Mistakes?

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Large open-source software projects involve developers with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. Such software projects furthermore include many internal APIs that developers must understand and use properly. According to the intended purpose of these APIs, they are more or less frequently used, and used by developers with more or less expertise. In this paper, we study the impact of usage patterns and developer expertise on the rate of defects occurring in the use of internal APIs. For this preliminary study, we focus on memory management APIs in the Linux kernel, as the use of these has been shown to be highly error prone in previous work. We study defect rates and developer expertise, to consider e.g., whether widely used APIs are more defect prone because they are used by less experienced developers, or whether defects in widely used APIs are more likely to be fixed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software, ACP4IS 2010
EditorsBram Adams, Michael Haupt, Daniel Lohmann
PublisherUniversitatsverlag Potsdam
Pages9-15
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9783869560434
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2010
Event9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software, ACP4IS 2010, co-located with the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, AOSD 2010 - Rennes, France
Duration: 16 Mar 2010 → …

Publication series

NameTechnische Berichte des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts fur Softwaresystemtechnik an der Universitat Potsdam
Volume33
ISSN (Print)2191-1665
ISSN (Electronic)1613-5652

Conference

Conference9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software, ACP4IS 2010, co-located with the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, AOSD 2010
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityRennes
Period16/03/10 → …

Keywords

  • Coccinelle
  • Herodotos
  • History of pattern occurrences
  • bug tracking

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