Software code review is an inspection of a code change by an independent third-party developer in order to identify and fix defects before an integration. Effectively performing code review can improve the overall software quality. In recent years, Modern Code Review (MCR), a lightweight and tool-based code inspection, has been widely adopted in both proprietary and open-source software systems. Finding appropriate codereviewers in MCR is a necessary step of reviewing a code change. However, little research is known the difficulty of finding codereviewers in a distributed software development and its impact on reviewing time. In this paper, we investigate the impact of reviews with code-reviewer assignment problem has on reviewing time. We find that reviews with code-reviewer assignment problem take 12 days longer to approve a code change. To help developers find appropriate code-reviewers, we propose REVFINDER, a file location-based code-reviewer recommendation approach. We leverage a similarity of previously reviewed file path to recommend an appropriate code-reviewer. The intuition is that files that are located in similar file paths would be managed and reviewed by similar experienced code-reviewers. Through an empirical evaluation on a case study of 42,045 reviews of Android Open Source Project (AOSP), OpenStack, Qt and LibreOffice projects, we find that REVFINDER accurately recommended 79% of reviews with a top 10 recommendation. REVFINDER also correctly recommended the code-reviewers with a median rank of 4. The overall ranking of REVFINDER is 3 times better than that of a baseline approach. We believe that REVFINDER could be applied to MCR in order to help developers find appropriate code-reviewers and speed up the overall code review process.

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Links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, and source code repositories are no exception. However, despite their many undisputed benefits, links can suffer from decay, insufficient versioning, and lack of bidirectional traceability. In this paper, we investigate the role of links contained in source code comments from these perspectives. We conducted a large-scale study of around 9.6 million links to establish their prevalence, and we used a mixed-methods approach to identify the links' targets, purposes, decay, and evolutionary aspects. We found that links are prevalent in source code repositories, that licenses, software homepages, and specifications are common types of link targets, and that links are often included to provide metadata or attribution. Links are rarely updated, but many link targets evolve. Almost 10% of the links included in source code comments are dead. We then submitted a batch of link-fixing pull requests to open source software repositories, resulting in most of our fixes being merged successfully. Our findings indicate that links in source code comments can indeed be fragile, and our work opens up avenues for future work to address these problems.12 https://stackoverflow.com/q/312443 13 We used LWP::UserAgent and LWP::RobotUA.

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