Do Developers Introduce Bugs When They Do Not Communicate? The Case of Eclipse and Mozilla

Developers working on related artifacts often communicate each other to coordinate their changes and to make others aware of their changes. When such a communication does not occur, this could create misunderstanding and cause the introduction of bugs. This paper investigates how the level of communication between committers relates to their proneness to introduce faults. This is done by identifying committers likely responsible of bug-introducing changes, and comparing - through social network measures - characteristics of their communication with the characteristics of other committers. We report results from a study conducted on bugs from Eclipse and Mozilla, indicating that bug-introducing committers have a higher social importance than other committers, although the communication between themselves is significantly lower than for others.