Good or Bad Committers? A Case Study of Committers´ Cautiousness and the Consequences on the Bug Fixing Process in the Eclipse Project

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 Eclipse-Platform 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.