Peter C. Rigby, Margaret-Anne Storey, "Understanding Broadcast Based Peer Review on Open Source Software Projects", Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2011

Link:
Download Publication

Abstract and additional information:

Software peer review has proven to be a successful technique
in open source software (OSS) development. In contrast
to industry, where reviews are typically assigned to specific
individuals, changes are broadcast to hundreds of potentially
interested stakeholders. Despite concerns that reviews may
be ignored, or that discussions will deadlock because too
many uninformed stakeholders are involved, we find that
this approach works well in practice. In this paper, we
describe an empirical study to investigate the mechanisms
and behaviours that developers use to find code changes they
are competent to review. We also explore how stakeholders
interact with one another during the review process. We
manually examine hundreds of reviews across five high profile
OSS projects. Our findings provide insights into the simple,
community-wide techniques that developers use to effectively
manage large quantities of reviews. The themes that emerge
from our study are enriched and validated by interviewing
long-serving core developers.

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{Rigby2011ICSE,
  author =       {Peter C. Rigby and Margaret-Anne Storey},
  title =        {{Understanding Broadcast Based Peer Review on Open Source Software Projects}},
  booktitle = {{ICSE '11: To Appear in the Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering}},
  year =         {2011},
}