Replicability, real-time data, and the science of economic research: FRED, ALFRED, and VDC

This article discusses the linkages between two recent themes in economic research: "real time" data and replication. These two themes share many of the same ideas, specifically, that scientific research itself has a time dimension. In research using real-time data, this time dimension is the date on which particular observations, or pieces of data, became available. In work with replication, it is the date on which a study (and its results) became available to other researchers and/or was published. Recognition of both dimensions of scientific research is important. A project at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to place large amounts of historical data on the Internet holds promise to unify these two themes.Research ; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Are developers fixing their own bugs?: Tracing bug-fixing and bug-seeding committers

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 IGI GlobalThe process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.This work has been partially funded by the European Commission, under the ALERT project (ICT-258098)