[Python-Dev] A Survey on Defect Management Practices in Free/Open Source Software

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 04:07:18PM +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
> This one was at least personally addressed 
> (well, to "Python Contributors"), which is a step ahead of most of 
> them. 

What gets me is that such surveys are invalid because the respondents
aren't randomly selected -- they're the people who care enough to
answer.  It would be more efficient and reliable to just go look at a
sampling of project web sites and look at their bug trackers, but that
requires effort from the student.

Recently I was interviewing a student who worked on a project that had
instrumented an IDE to record every operation (editing, saving, etc.)
in a database.  I asked "so what did you learn from this data?", and
was told that no one has analyzed it; they're just *accumulating* the
data.  It's stamp collecting as computer science.

--amk, who save his files every 87.4 seconds and types a character
       every 2.3sec.