Bug-Patching for Mozilla's Firefox

Abstract

The case study of the Mozilla project is focused on the organization of quality control and quality assurance in a distributed innovation environment, and focuses on the coordination of the detection and correction of operating defects ('bugs') in Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Analyzing two samples of bugs drawn from the 40,000 or so that have resulted in a change to the Firefox code base, the case study finds among others that bug treatment behavior in the project was not temporal stable, that bug reports from 'outsiders' took longer to find a successful resolution and were more likely to remain 'un-fixed' and that factors such as the objective technical complexity of the bug-patching problem, and the level of effort devoted to the contextualisation the reported defect played significant roles determining the speed with which a bug was typically fixed.