Awards - Distinguished paper award for study of code review bots

28-Sep-2020

Paper studying the effects of code review bots co-authored by Alexander Serebrenik (Eindhoven) and his Brazilian and American colleagues has been selected to receive an IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution 2020 (ICSME).

In this paper Mairieli Wessel (University of São Paulo, Brazil), Alexander Serebrenik, Igor Wiese (Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Campo Mourão, Brazil), Igor Steinmacher (Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Campo Mourão, Brazil and Northern Arizona University, USA), and Marco A. Gerosa (Northern Arizona University, USA) have studied the impact of code review bots on pull requests submitted to open source projects. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects’ social interactions.

Preprint of the paper can be found online: https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/ICSME2020Mairieli.pdf