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.
Shane McIntosh, McGill University
Shane McIntosh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, where he leads the Software Repository Excavation and Build Engineering Labs (Software REBELs). He received his Bachelor‘s degree in Applied Computing from the University of Guelph and his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Queen’s University, for which he was awarded the Governor General of Canada's Academic Gold Medal. In his research, Shane uses empirical software engineering techniques to study software build systems, release engineering, and software quality. More info about Shane and the REBELs is available online.
