Paper Info
Title
Impact of Installation Counts on Perceived Quality: A Case Study on Debian
Abstract
Software defects are generally used to indicate software quality. However, due to the nature of software, we are often only able to know about the defects found and reported, either following the testing process or after being deployed. In software research studies, it is assumed that a higher amount of defect reports represents a higher amount of defects in the software system. In this paper, we argue that widely deployed programs have more reported defects, regardless of their actual number of defects. To address this question, we perform a case study on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, a well-known free / open source software collection. We compare the defects reported for all the software packages in Debian with their popularity. We find that the number of reported defects for a Debian package is limited by its popularity. This finding has implications on defect prediction studies, showing that they need to consider the impact of popularity on perceived quality, otherwise they might be risking bias.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/WCRE.2011.34
WCRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
software system,reported defect,software package,higher amount,case study,debian package,software quality,software defect,perceived quality,open source software collection,installation counts,software research study,debian gnu,public domain software,correlation,measurement,databases,linux
Software research,Software engineering,Computer science,Popularity,Software system,Software,Software quality,Open source software,Public domain software
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.65
16
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Israel Herraiz150326.83
Emad Shihab2122954.74
Thanh H.D. Nguyen327011.84
Ahmed E. Hassan45959287.68