Impact of developer reputation on code review outcomes in OSS projects: an empirical investigation

Context: Gaining an identity and building a good reputation are important motivations for Open Source Software (OSS) developers. It is unclear whether these motivations have any actual impact on OSS project success. Goal: To identify how an OSS developer's reputation affects the outcome of his/her code review requests. Method: We conducted a social network analysis (SNA) of the code review data from eight popular OSS projects. Working on the assumption that core developers have better reputation than peripheral developers, we developed an approach, Core Identification using K-means (CIK) to divide the OSS developers into core and periphery groups based on six SNA centrality measures. We then compared the outcome of the code review process for members of the two groups. Results: The results suggest that the core developers receive quicker first feedback on their review request, complete the review process in shorter time, and are more likely to have their code changes accepted into the project codebase. Peripheral developers may have to wait 2 - 19 times (or 12 - 96 hours) longer than core developers for the review process of their code to complete. Conclusion: We recommend that projects allocate resources or create tool support to triage the code review requests to motivate prospective developers through quick feedback.