Search-Based Peer Reviewers Recommendation in Modern Code Review

Abstract

Code review is of primary importance in modern software development. It is widely recognized that peer review is an efficient and effective practice for improving software quality and reducing defect proneness. For successful review process, peer reviewers should have a deep experience and knowledge with the code being reviewed, and familiar to work and collaborate together. However, one of the main challenging tasks in modern code review is to find the most appropriate reviewers for submitted code changes. So far, reviewers assignment is still a manual, costly and time-consuming task. In this paper, we introduce a search-based approach, namely RevRec, to provide decision-making support for code change submitters and/or reviewers assigners to identify most appropriate peer reviewers for their code changes. RevRec aims at finding reviewers to be assigned for a code change based on their expertise and collaboration in past reviews using genetic algorithm (GA). We evaluated our approach on a benchmark of three open-source software systems, Android, OpenStack, and Qt. Results indicate that RevRec accurately recommends code reviewers with up to 59% of precision and 74% of recall. Our experiments provide evidence that leveraging reviewers expertise from their prior reviews and the socio-technical aspects of the team work and collaboration is relevant in improving the performance of peer reviewers recommendation in modern code review.