Reviewer recommendation using software artifact traceability graphs

Abstract

Various types of artifacts (requirements, source code, test cases, documents, etc.) are produced throughout the lifecycle of a software. These artifacts are often related with each other via traceability links that are stored in modern application lifecycle management repositories. Throughout the lifecycle of a software, various types of changes can arise in any one of these artifacts. It is important to review such changes to minimize their potential negative impacts. To maximize benefits of the review process, the reviewer(s) should be chosen appropriately. In this study, we reformulate the reviewer suggestion problem using software artifact traceability graphs. We introduce a novel approach, named RSTrace, to automatically recommend reviewers that are best suited based on their familiarity with a given artifact. The proposed approach, in theory, could be applied to all types of artifacts. For the purpose of this study, we focused on the source code artifact and conducted an experiment on finding the appropriate code reviewer(s). We initially tested RSTrace on an open source project and achieved top-3 recall of 0.85 with an MRR (mean reciprocal ranking) of 0.73. In a further empirical evaluation of 37 open source projects, we confirmed that the proposed reviewer recommendation approach yields promising top-k and MRR scores on the average compared to the existing reviewer recommendation approaches.