An Approach to Recommend Reviewers using File Path Similarity for Peer Code Review Process

Patanamon Thongtanunam(1251211)


Peer code review is an important quality assurance mechanism in both software development and maintenance phase. Effectively performing code review would increase the quality of software and reduce the number of defects but requires reviewers with experiences and a deep understanding of system code. However, in distributed software development projects, manual finding an appropriate reviewer is difficult and time-consuming. To this end, this thesis proposes a reviewer recommendation algorithm based on locations of changed file. This is called FPS algorithm. The algorithm was evaluated using three Open Source Software projects and compared with the existing reviewer recommendation algorithm. Moreover, the thesis studies factors that impact to the reviewer recommendation algorithms. Specifically, the impact of file structure and time prioritization were investigated. The results indicate that there performance of FPS algorithm is significantly better than the performance existing reviewer recommendation algorithm; and file structure has impact to the performance while the time prioritization cannot improve the performance.