Who Should Review This Change? Putting Text and File Location Analyses Together for More Accurate Recommendations

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

10-2015

Abstract

Software code review is a process of developers inspecting new code changes made by others, to evaluate their quality and identify and fix defects, before integrating them to the main branch of a version control system. Modern Code Review (MCR), a lightweight and tool-based variant of conventional codereview, is widely adopted in both open source and proprietary software projects. One challenge that impacts MCR is the assignment of appropriate developers to review a code change. Considering that there could be hundreds of potential code reviewers in a software project, picking suitable reviewers is not a straightforward task. A prior study by Thongtanunam et al. showed that the difficulty in selecting suitable reviewers may delay the review process by an average of 12 days. In this paper, to address the challenge of assigning suitable reviewers to changes, we propose a hybrid and incremental approach Tie which utilizes the advantages of both Text mIning and a filE location-based approach. To do this, Tie integrates an incremental text mining model which analyzes the textual contents in a reviewrequest, and a similarity model which measures the similarity of changed file paths and reviewed filepaths. We perform a large-scale experiment on four open source projects, namely Android, OpenStack, QT, and LibreOffice, containing a total of 42,045 reviews. The experimental results show that on average Tie can achieve top-1, top-5, and top-10 accuracies, and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.52, 0.79, 0.85, and 0.64 for the four projects, which improves the state-of-the-art approach RevFinder, proposed by Thongtanunam et al., by 61%, 23%, 8%, and 37%, respectively.

Keywords

Modern Code Review, Path Similarity, Recommendation System, Text Mining

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2015 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME): September 29-October 1, 2015, Bremen, Gemany: Proceedings

First Page

261

Last Page

270

ISBN

9781467375320

Identifier

10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332472

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332472

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