Mining Gerrit Data to Study Contentious Reviews and Community Evolution

Software teams that use Gerrit are quickly accumulating data about their code reviewing processes. The Software REBELs—a research lab at McGill University—mine code review data to study topics like the impact that code review practices have on software release and design quality. Our more recent work mines code review data to study the reviewing process itself. In this talk, I will describe the results of two empirical studies of data that we collected from the Gerrit instances of the OpenStack project. The first study aims to understand the reviews where reviewers disagree about a patch. The second study follows how the concerns that reviewers raise evolve as the OpenStack community ages and individual reviews accrue experience.

Slides

Shane McIntosh, McGill University