Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

Mairieli Wessel; Alexander Serebrenik; Igor Scaliante Wiese; Igor Steinmacher; Marco Aurelio Gerosa

doi:10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011

Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

Mairieli Wessel, Alexander Serebrenik, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Igor Steinmacher, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

Software Engineering and Technology

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

40 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. 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.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020
Publisher	IEEE Computer Society
Number of pages	11
ISBN (Electronic)	9781728156194
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011
Publication status	Published - 30 Sept 2020

Keywords

Code Review
GitHub Bots
Open Source Software
Software Bots
Software Engineering

Access to Document

10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011

https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/ICSME2020Mairieli.pdf

Cite this

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title = "Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects",

abstract = "Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. 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{\textquoteright} social interactions.",

keywords = "Code Review, GitHub Bots, Open Source Software, Software Bots, Software Engineering",

author = "Mairieli Wessel and Alexander Serebrenik and {Scaliante Wiese}, Igor and Igor Steinmacher and Gerosa, {Marco Aurelio}",

year = "2020",

month = sep,

day = "30",

doi = "10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011",

language = "English",

booktitle = "Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020",

publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",

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}

Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects. / Wessel, Mairieli; Serebrenik, Alexander; Scaliante Wiese, Igor et al.
Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020. IEEE Computer Society, 2020. 9240622.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

TY - GEN

T1 - Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

AU - Wessel, Mairieli

AU - Serebrenik, Alexander

AU - Scaliante Wiese, Igor

AU - Steinmacher, Igor

AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurelio

PY - 2020/9/30

Y1 - 2020/9/30

N2 - Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. 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.

AB - Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. 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.

KW - Code Review

KW - GitHub Bots

KW - Open Source Software

KW - Software Bots

KW - Software Engineering

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DO - 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00011

M3 - Conference contribution

BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020

PB - IEEE Computer Society

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Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

Abstract

Keywords

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