Abstract-Software code review is an inspection of a code change by an independent third-party developer in order to identify and fix defects before an integration. Effectively performing code review can improve the overall software quality. In recent years, Modern Code Review (MCR), a lightweight and tool-based code inspection, has been widely adopted in both proprietary and open-source software systems. Finding appropriate codereviewers in MCR is a necessary step of reviewing a code change. However, little research is known the difficulty of finding codereviewers in a distributed software development and its impact on reviewing time. In this paper, we investigate the impact of reviews with code-reviewer assignment problem has on reviewing time. We find that reviews with code-reviewer assignment problem take 12 days longer to approve a code change. To help developers find appropriate code-reviewers, we propose REVFINDER, a file location-based code-reviewer recommendation approach. We leverage a similarity of previously reviewed file path to recommend an appropriate code-reviewer. The intuition is that files that are located in similar file paths would be managed and reviewed by similar experienced code-reviewers. Through an empirical evaluation on a case study of 42,045 reviews of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), OpenStack, Qt and LibreOffice projects, we find that REVFINDER accurately recommended 79% of reviews with a top 10 recommendation. REVFINDER also correctly recommended the code-reviewers with a median rank of 4. The overall ranking of REVFINDER is 3 times better than that of a baseline approach. We believe that REVFINDER could be applied to MCR in order to help developers find appropriate code-reviewers and speed up the overall code review process.
REF revealed that 4%-30% of reviews have code reviewer assignment problem.
Who should review my code? A file location-based code-reviewer recommendation approach for Modern Code Review
2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)
2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)
Computer Science