On Relating Technical, Social Factors, and the Introduction of Bugs

As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. This increase makes it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with buggy contributions. Collaborative environments like GitHub provide a rich source of data on developers' contributions. Such data can be used to extract information about developers regarding technical (e.g., their experience) and social (e.g., their interactions) factors. Recent studies analyzed the influence of these factors on different activities of software development. However, there is still room for improvement on the relation between these factors and the introduction of bugs. We present a broader study, including 8 projects from different domains and 6,537 bug reports, on relating five technical, three social factors, and the introduction of bugs. The results indicate that technical and social factors can discriminate between buggy and clean commits. But, the technical factors are more determining than social ones. Particularly, the developers' habits of not following technical contribution norms and the developer's commit bugginess are associated with an increase on commit bugginess. On the other hand, project's establishment, ownership level of developers' commit, and social influence are related to a lower chance of introducing bugs.