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

Developers working on related artifacts often communicateeach other to coordinate their changes and to makeothers aware of their changes. When such a communicationdoes not occur, this could create misunderstanding and causethe introduction of bugs.This paper investigates how the level of communicationbetween committers relates to their proneness to introducefaults. This is done by identifying committers likely responsibleof bug-introducing changes, and comparing—through socialnetwork measures—characteristics of their communicationwith the characteristics of other committers.We report results from a study conducted on bugs fromEclipse and Mozilla, indicating that bug-introducing committershave a higher social importance than other committers,although the communication between themselves is significantlylower than for others.