Skip to main content

How Many Eyeballs Does a Bug Need? An Empirical Validation of Linus’ Law

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 179))

Abstract

Linus’ Law reflects on a key characteristic of open source software development: developers’ tendency to closely work together in the bug resolution process. In this paper we empirically examine Linus’ Law using a data-set of 1,000+ Android bugs, owned by 70+ developers. Our results indicate that encouraging developers to work closely with one another has nuanced implications; while one form of contact may help reduce bug resolution time, another form can have quite the opposite effect. We present statistically significant evidence in support of our results and discuss their relevance at the individual and organizational levels.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Raymond, E.S.: The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Shaw, M.: Continuing prospects for an engineering discipline of software. IEEE Software 26, 64–67 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Guana, V., Rocha, F., Hindle, A., Stroulia, E.: Do the stars align? multidimensional analysis of android’s layered architecture. In: 2012 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pp. 124–127 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Meneely, A., Williams, L.: Secure open source collaboration: An empirical study of linus’ law. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 453–462 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Meneely, A., Williams, L.: Strengthening the empirical analysis of the relationship between linus’ law and software security. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2010, pp. 9:1–9:10. ACM, New York (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Glass, R.L.: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. Addison Wesley Professional, Pearson Education [distributor], Boston, Old Tappan (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Wang, J., Carroll, J.M.: Behind linus’s law: A preliminary analysis of open source software peer review practices in mozilla and python. In: 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), pp. 117–124. IEEE (May 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Shihab, E., Kamei, Y., Bhattacharya, P.: Mining challenge 2012: The android platform. In: The 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Conway, M.: How do committees invent?. Datamation Journal, 28–31 (April 1968)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Jeong, G., Kim, S., Zimmermann, T.: Improving bug triage with bug tossing graphs. In: ESEC/FSE 2009, pp. 111–120. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I.: Latent dirichlet allocation. J. M. L. R. (March 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Steyvers, M., Griffiths, T.: Probabilistic topic models. In: Latent Semantic Analysis: A Road to Meaning. Lawrence Erlbaum (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Falessi, D., Cantone, G., Canfora, G.: Empirical principles and an industrial case study in retrieving equivalent requirements via natural language processing techniques. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 39(1), 18–44 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Kullback, S., Leibler, R.A.: On information and sufficiency. Ann. Math. Statist. 22(1), 79–86 (1951)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Albert, R., Barabasi, A.: Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Cond-mat/0106096 (June 2001); Reviews of Modern Physics 74, 47 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Tabachnick, B., Fidell, L.: Using Multivariate Statistics. Pearson Education, Boston (2007)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Datta, S., Sarkar, P., Das, S., Sreshtha, S., Lade, P., Majumder, S. (2014). How Many Eyeballs Does a Bug Need? An Empirical Validation of Linus’ Law. In: Cantone, G., Marchesi, M. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 179. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_17

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06861-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06862-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics