skip to main content
10.1145/2414721.2414726acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessplashConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Peer code review in open source communitiesusing reviewboard

Published: 21 October 2012 Publication History

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.

References

[1]
ReviewBoard on Google Code. http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/ Accessed August 05, 2012.
[2]
ReviewBoard official website. http://www.reviewboard.org Accessed August, 05, 2012.
[3]
MusicBrainz official website. http://musicbrainz.org/ Accessed August 05, 2012.
[4]
Asterisk official website. http://www.asterisk.org/ Accessed August 5, 2012.
[5]
Asterisk code acceptance policy. https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Reviewboard+Usage Accessed August 5, 2012.
[6]
Code review glossary. http://www.reviewboard.org/docs/manual/dev/glossary/ Ac-cessed August 5, 2012.
[7]
J. Asundi and R. Jayant. Patch review processes in open source software development communities: A comparative case study. In 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2007).
[8]
Christain Hammmond, "ReviewBoard release announcement,"
[9]
M. Fagan. Reviews and inspections. Software Pioneers--Contributions to Software Engineering 562--573. 2002.
[10]
G. Lee and R. Cole. From a firm-based to a community-based model of knowledge creation: The case of the linux kernel development. Organization Science 14(6): 633--649. 2003.
[11]
A. Porter, H. Siy, A. Mockus and L. Votta. Understanding the sources of variation in software inspections. ACM Trans-actions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 7(1): 41--79. 1998.
[12]
P. C. Rigby and M. A. Storey. Understanding broadcast based peer review on open source software projects. In Proceeding of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering.
[13]
P. C. Rigby and D. M. German. (2006, A preliminary examination of code review processes in open source projects. Technical Report DCS-305-IR, University of Victoria,
[14]
P. C. Rigby, D. M. German and M. Storey. Open source software peer review practices: A case study of the apache server. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering. Leipzig, Germany Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1368088.1368162
[15]
G. Robles, S. Koch and J. Gonzalez-Barahona. (2004, Remote analysis and measurement by means of the CVSAnalY tool. Working Paper, Informatics Department, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos,(June).{Available at: http://opensource. mit. edu/papers/robles-kochbarahona\_cvsanaly. pdf.},
[16]
S. Turner, M. A. Perez-Quinones, S. Edwards and J. Chase. Peer review in CS2: Conceptual learning. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.
[17]
K. Wiegers and B. Addison-Wesley. Peer reviews in software: A practical guide. Recherche 6702. 2001.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Do Words Have Power? Understanding and Fostering Civility in Code Review DiscussionProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36607801:FSE(1632-1655)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and PracticeACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/358500432:4(1-61)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
  • (2018)Understanding Review Expertise of Developers: A Reviewer Recommendation Approach Based on Latent Dirichlet AllocationSymmetry10.3390/sym1004011410:4(114)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
PLATEAU '12: Proceedings of the ACM 4th annual workshop on Evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools
October 2012
46 pages
ISBN:9781450316316
DOI:10.1145/2414721
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 October 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. code review
  2. mining repositories
  3. open source software
  4. peer review
  5. review board

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '12
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 5 of 8 submissions, 63%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Do Words Have Power? Understanding and Fostering Civility in Code Review DiscussionProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36607801:FSE(1632-1655)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and PracticeACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/358500432:4(1-61)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
  • (2018)Understanding Review Expertise of Developers: A Reviewer Recommendation Approach Based on Latent Dirichlet AllocationSymmetry10.3390/sym1004011410:4(114)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2018
  • (2016)The Impact of a Low Level of Agreement Among Reviewers in a Code Review ProcessOpen Source Systems: Integrating Communities10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_8(97-110)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
  • (2015)CoreDevRec: Automatic Core Member Recommendation for Contribution EvaluationJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-015-1577-330:5(998-1016)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2015
  • (2014)Impact of developer reputation on code review outcomes in OSS projectsProceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/2652524.2652544(1-10)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2014
  • (2014)Identifying the characteristics of vulnerable code changes: an empirical studyProceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2635868.2635880(257-268)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2014
  • (2014)Characteristics of the vulnerable code changes identified through peer code reviewCompanion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/2591062.2591200(736-738)Online publication date: 31-May-2014
  • (2013)Peer Code Review to Prevent Security VulnerabilitiesProceedings of the 2013 IEEE Seventh International Conference on Software Security and Reliability Companion10.1109/SERE-C.2013.22(229-230)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2013

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media