GitHub-OSS Fixit: Fixing bugs at scale in a Software Engineering Course
Shin Hwei Tan, Chunfeng Hu, Ziqiang Li, Xiaowen Zhang, Ying Zhou

TL;DR
This paper presents GitHub-OSS Fixit, an online course project where students contribute to open-source Java projects by fixing bugs, demonstrating improved skills and practical experience through real-world contributions.
Contribution
It introduces a scalable online course framework for teaching software engineering through open-source bug fixing, leveraging automated analysis tools and real-world project participation.
Findings
154 students submitted 214 pull requests
59 pull requests were merged into projects
82 pull requests were closed by developers
Abstract
Many studies have shown the benefits of introducing open-source projects into teaching Software Engineering (SE) courses. However, there are several limitations of existing studies that limit the wide adaptation of open-source projects in a classroom setting, including (1) the selected project is limited to one particular project, (2) most studies only investigated on its effect on teaching a specific SE concept, and (3) students may make mistakes in their contribution which leads to poor quality code. Meanwhile, software companies have successfully launched programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and FindBugs "fixit" to contribute to open-source projects. Inspired by the success of these programs, we propose GitHub-OSS Fixit, a course project where students are taught to contribute to open-source Java projects by fixing bugs reported in GitHub. We described our course outline to…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Open Source Software Innovations
