Characterization of the Xen Project Code Review Process:
an Experience Report
The paper “Characterization of the Xen Project Code Review Process” to appear in the proceedings of 13th international conference on Mining Software Repositories to be held on 14–15 May 2016 in Austin, Texas, USA.
Abstract
Many software development projects have introduced manda-
tory code review for every change to the code. This means
that the project needs to devote a significant effort to re-
view all proposed changes, and that their merging into the
code base may get considerably delayed. Therefore, all those
projects need to understand how code review is working, and
the delays it is causing in time to merge.
This is the case in the Xen project, which performs peer
review using mailing lists. During the first half of 2015, some
people in the project observed a large and sustained increase
in the number of messages related to code review, which had
started some years before. This observation led to concerns
on whether the code review process was having some trouble,
and too large an impact on the overall development process.
Those concerns were addressed with a quantitative study,
which is presented in this paper. Based on the informa-
tion in code review messages, some metrics were defined to
infer delays imposed by code review. The study produced
quantitative data suitable for informed discussion, which the
project is using to understand its code review process, and
to take decisions to improve it.
Authors
Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar, Lars Kurth, Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Santiago Dueas and Nelson Sekitoleko
Preprint of the paper can be found here: https://github.com/nellysek/Research/blob/master/msr2016.pdf
