Code Review Participation: Game Theoretical Modeling of Reviewers in Gerrit Datasets

Abstract

Code review is a common practice for improving the quality of source code changes and expediting knowledge transfer in a development community. In modern code review, source code changes or patches are considered to be assessed and approved for integration by multiple reviews. However, from our empirical study, we found that some patches are reviewed by only one reviewer, and some reviewers did not continue the review discussion, which can have negative effects on software quality. To understand these reviewers' behaviors, we model the code review situation based on the snowdrift game, which is used to analyze social dilemmas. With this game-theoretical modeling, we found that it can explain reviewers' behaviors well.