Effective assignment and assistance to software developers and reviewers

Abstract

DEDICATIONTo my parents and my sister. In this dissertation, we first present the automated solutions for Software Change Impact Analysis based on interaction and code review activities of developers. Then we provide explanation for two separate developer expertise models which use the micro-levels of human-to-code and human-to-human interactions from the previous code review and interaction activities of developers. Next, we present a reviewer expertise model based on code review activities of developers and show how this expertise model can be used for Code Reviewer Recommendation. At the end we examine the influential features that characterize the acceptance probability of a submitted patch (implemented code change) by developers. We present a predictive model that classifies whether a patch will be accepted or not as soon as it is submitted for code review in order to assist developers and reviewers in prioritizing and focusing their efforts.A rigorous empirical validation on large open source and commercial systems shows that the solutions based on the presented methodology outperform several existing solutions. The quantitative gains of our solutions across a spectrum of evaluation metrics along with their statistical significance are reported.vi