Evolutionary trends in the collaborative review process of a large software system

In this paper, we study the evolutionary trends in the collaborative review process of a large open source software system. As expected, the number of reviews, the number of reviews commented on, as well as the number of reviewers, and the interactions between them show increasing trends over time....

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: DATTA, Subhajit, SARKAR, Poulami
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5577
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6580/viewcontent/EvolutionalTrends_CollabReview_2019_pv.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:In this paper, we study the evolutionary trends in the collaborative review process of a large open source software system. As expected, the number of reviews, the number of reviews commented on, as well as the number of reviewers, and the interactions between them show increasing trends over time. But unexpectedly, levels of clustering between developers in their interaction networks show a decreasing trend, even as connections between them increase. In the context of our study, clustering is an indicator of developer collaboration, whereas connection points to how intensely developers work together. Thus the trends we observe can inform how developer interactions become concentrated around specific units of work as the project progresses. The dichotomy between the simultaneous increase in connection and decrease in clustering also points to the interplay between collective and individual efforts in the review process, and the distinct nature of peer review in the software development life cycle.