The Impact of Human Factors on the Participation Decision of Reviewers in Modern Code Review

Shade Ruangwan (1551208)

Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR processes, every new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is examined by reviewers in order to identify weakness 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 intense review participation. However, there is a likely case that a new patch still suffers from poor review participation even though reviewers were invited.

In this presentation, we first describe code review and MCR. Next, we present the results of our exploratory study on the current practices of reviewer participation. Specifically, we find that 23\%-66\% of patches have at least one invited reviewer who ignored the review invitation. Finally, we present the results of our investigation of the factors that can influence the participation decision of an invited reviewer. In particular, through a case study of 211,374 patches spread across the Android, OpenStack and Qt systems, we find that (1) our prediction models that include human factors outperform the models that do not include human factors; (2) a review participation rate of an invited reviewers and code authoring experience of an invited reviewer are the most influential factors that influence the participation decision of an invited reviewer. Our results suggest that developers should consider human factors when inviting reviewers in order to increase the likelihood that an invited reviewer will accept a review invitation.