The Impact of Human Factors on the Participation Decision of Reviewers in Modern Code ReviewJournal-First
Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR process, a new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is encouraged to be examined by reviewers in order to identify weaknesses in source code prior to an integration into main software repositories. To mitigate the risk of having future defects, prior work suggests that MCR should be performed with sufficient review participation. Indeed, recent work shows that a low number of participated reviewers is associated with poor software quality. However, there is a likely case that a new patch still suffers from poor review participation even though reviewers were invited. Hence, in this paper, we set out to investigate the factors that are associated with the participation decision of an invited reviewer. Through a case study of 230,090 patches spread across the Android, LibreOffice, OpenStack and Qt systems, we find that (1) 16%-66% of patches have at least one invited reviewer who did not respond to the review invitation; (2) human factors play an important role in predicting whether or not an invited reviewer will participate in a review; (3) a review participation rate of an invited reviewers and code authoring experience of an invited reviewer are highly associated with the participation decision of an invited reviewer. These results can help practitioners better understand about how human factors associate with the participation decision of reviewers and serve as guidelines for inviting reviewers, leading to a better inviting decision and a better reviewer participation.
Fri 31 May Times are displayed in time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
16:00 - 17:20: Code ReviewsPapers / Journal-First Papers / Technical Track at Laurier Chair(s): Alexander SerebrenikEindhoven University of Technology | |||
16:00 - 16:20 Talk | Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical StudyTechnical TrackIndustry Program Technical Track Davide SpadiniDelft University of Technology, Netherlands, Fabio PalombaUniversity of Zurich, Tobias BaumLeibniz Universität Hannover, Stefan HanenbergUniversity of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, Magiel BruntinkSoftware Improvement Group, Alberto BacchelliUniversity of Zurich DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
16:20 - 16:40 Talk | Why Does Code Review Work for Open Source Software Communities?Technical Track Technical Track Adam AlamiIT University of Copenhagen, Marisa Leavitt CohnIT University of Copenhagen, Andrzej WąsowskiIT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Pre-print | ||
16:40 - 16:50 Talk | Does Reviewer Recommendation Help Developers?Industry ProgramJournal-First Journal-First Papers Vladimir KovalenkoTU Delft, Nava TintarevDelft University of Technology, Evgeny PasynkovJetBrains GmbH, Christian BirdMicrosoft Research, Alberto BacchelliUniversity of Zurich DOI Pre-print | ||
16:50 - 17:00 Talk | The Impact of Human Factors on the Participation Decision of Reviewers in Modern Code ReviewJournal-First Journal-First Papers Shade RuangwanNara Institute of Science and Technology, Patanamon ThongtanunamThe University of Melbourne, Akinori IharaWakayama University, Kenichi MatsumotoNara Institute of Science and Technology DOI Pre-print | ||
17:00 - 17:20 Talk | Discussion Period Papers |