Negotiation and the coordination of information and activity in distributed software problem management

Abstract

Publicly accessible bug report repositories maintained by free / open source development communities provide vast stores of data about distributed software problem management (SWPM). Qualitative analysis of individual bug reports, texts that record community responses to reported software problems, shows how this distributed community uses its SWPM process to manage software quality. We focus on the role of one basic social process, negotiation, in SWPM. We report on the varieties and frequencies of negotiation practices and demonstrate how instances of negotiation in different contexts affect the organization of information, the allocation of community resources, and the disposition of software problems.