After reading The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories by Jorge Aranda and Gina Venolia, I realized that software bugs are more elusive than I had accounted for.
The goal of the study was to provide an account of coordination involved in bug fixing tasks, but the second research question that they tried to answer in their research is what had me more captivated: Do electronic traces of interaction provide a good enough picture of coordination, or is nonpersistent knowledge necessary to understand the story of each bug fix?
The short answer is no, non persistent knowledge is still necessary, and that is reflected in all thier work, from their limitations, to the case study and survey results. As they put it: Electronic repositories hold incomplete or incorrect data more often than not.
This shows that even the simplest of bugs involve social, organizational and technical knowledge that cannot be stored nor analyzed in an efficient, automated way. And that is very interesting given that as a software developer, one will spend more time maintaining and modifying other people’s code than writing their own from scratch. The current technology and coding culture still has long steps to go until we know how to better deal with bugs, while also documenting them well enough as to avoid future similar occurences.
This study is interesting if you want to learn about the limitations that surround computer development studies, how elusive bugs are, ways to deal with the complexity of tracking the history of the bugs and a set of goals that provide a framework to analyze the effectiveness of coordination.
If you have any interest in those fields then I absolutely recommend you to give this study a read.
Ubora 