Abstract
Onboarding is a critical stage in the tenure of software developers with a project, because meaningful contribution requires familiarity with the codebase. Some software teams employ practices, such as mentoring, to help new developers get accustomed faster. Code review, i.e., the manual inspection of code changes, is an opportunity for sharing knowledge and helping with onboarding. In this study, we investigate whether and how contributions from developers with low experience in a project do receive a different treatment during code review. We compare reviewers' experience, metrics of reviewers' attention, and change merge rate between changes from newcomers and from more experienced authors in 60 active open source projects. We find that the only phenomenon that is consistent across the vast majority of projects is a lower merge rate for newcomers' changes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | CHASE'18 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings 2018 the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering |
| Place of Publication | New York, NY |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Pages | 29-32 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Volume | Part F137813 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-5725-8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
| Event | CHASE 2018: 11th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering - Gothenburg, Sweden Duration: 27 May 2018 → 27 May 2018 Conference number: 11 |
Conference
| Conference | CHASE 2018 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Sweden |
| City | Gothenburg |
| Period | 27/05/18 → 27/05/18 |