Peer code review in open source communitiesusing reviewboard

Abstract

Peer code review is an effective method to reduce the number of defects and maintain source code integrity. Peer re-views in most of the Open Source Software (OSS) communities are conducted via mailing list, which are difficult to manage at times. Code review tools aim to ease the review process and keep track of the review requests. In this paper, we describe preliminary results of our study to evaluate code review process using a popular open source code review tool (ReviewBoard) in OSS communities. Some of our study findings are similar to the findings of previous studies on code reviews. In the projects under our study, we found that, most of the revisions are not submitted for peer review. More than 80% of the review requests are responded by two or less number of reviewers. Top committers of the projects are also top contributors of code reviews. Most of the review requests get prompt feedback within a day; however, some requests might wait for feed-back for a long time. Most importantly, we have identified some interesting directions for future research.