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Impact of developer reputation on code review outcomes in OSS projects: an empirical investigation

Published: 18 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

<u>Context:</u> Gaining an identity and building a good reputation are important motivations for Open Source Software (OSS) developers. It is unclear whether these motivations have any actual impact on OSS project success. <u>Goal:</u> To identify how an OSS developer's reputation affects the outcome of his/her code review requests. <u>Method:</u> We conducted a social network analysis (SNA) of the code review data from eight popular OSS projects. Working on the assumption that core developers have better reputation than peripheral developers, we developed an approach, Core Identification using K-means (CIK) to divide the OSS developers into core and periphery groups based on six SNA centrality measures. We then compared the outcome of the code review process for members of the two groups. <u>Results:</u> The results suggest that the core developers receive quicker first feedback on their review request, complete the review process in shorter time, and are more likely to have their code changes accepted into the project codebase. Peripheral developers may have to wait 2 - 19 times (or 12 - 96 hours) longer than core developers for the review process of their code to complete. <u>Conclusion:</u> We recommend that projects allocate resources or create tool support to triage the code review requests to motivate prospective developers through quick feedback.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEM '14: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
September 2014
461 pages
ISBN:9781450327749
DOI:10.1145/2652524
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]

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Published: 18 September 2014

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Author Tags

  1. code review
  2. network structure
  3. open source
  4. peer impression
  5. social network analysis

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ESEM '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 123 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 130 of 594 submissions, 22%

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  • (2023)An Exploratory Study on Code Smells during Code Review in OSS Projects: A Case Study on OpenStack and WikiMediaRecent Advances in Computer Science and Communications10.2174/266625581666623022211231316:7Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • (2023)Investigating Developers' Contributions to Test Smell Survivability: A Study of Open-Source ProjectsProceedings of the 8th Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing10.1145/3624032.3624044(86-95)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Automatic Core-Developer Identification on GitHub: A Validation StudyACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/359380332:6(1-29)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2023
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