Quid Pro Quo: An Exploration of Reciprocity in Code Review

Gavidia-Calderon, Carlos; Han, DongGyun and Bennaceur, Amel (2022). Quid Pro Quo: An Exploration of Reciprocity in Code Review. In: 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR ’22), 23-24 May 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, ACM.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3528522

URL: https://conf.researchr.org/details/msr-2022/msrhac...

Abstract

We explore the role of reciprocity in code review processes. Reciprocity manifests itself in two ways: 1) reviewing code for others translates to accepted code contributions, and 2) having contributions accepted increases the reviews made for others. We use vector autoregressive (VAR) models to explore the causal relation between reviews performed and accepted contributions. After fitting VAR models for 24 active open-source developers, we found evidence of reciprocity in 6 of them. These results suggest reciprocity does play a role in code review, that can potentially be exploited to increase reviewer participation.

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About

• Item ORO ID
• 82823
• Item Type
• Conference or Workshop Item
• Project Funding Details

• Funded Project Name	Project ID	Funding Body
  Not Set	EP/V026747/1	EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
  Not Set	EP/R013144/1	EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)

• Keywords
• code review; collaboration; time series analysis
• Academic Unit or School
• Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) > Computing and Communications
  Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
• Copyright Holders
• © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery
• Depositing User
• Carlos Gavidia-Calderon