The impact of human factors on the participation decision of reviewers in modern code review

Abstract

Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR process, a new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is encouraged to be examined by reviewers in order to identify weaknesses in source code prior to an integration into main software repositories. To mitigate the risk of having future defects, prior work suggests that MCR should be performed with sufficient review participation. Indeed, recent work shows that a low number of participated reviewers is associated with poor software quality. However, there is a likely case that a new patch still suffers from poor review participation even though reviewers were invited. Hence, in this paper, we set out to investigate..