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 language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software : ACP4IS '10 |
| Editors | Bram Adams, Michael Haupt, Daniel Lohmann |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Publisher | Universitätsverlag Potsdam |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Pages | 9-15 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-86956-043-4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
| Event | 9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software - Rennes, France Duration: 16 Mar 2010 → 16 Mar 2010 Conference number: 9 |
Conference
| Conference | 9th Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software |
|---|---|
| Number | 9 |
| Country/Territory | France |
| City | Rennes |
| Period | 16/03/2010 → 16/03/2010 |