Modeling Modern Code Review Practices in Open Source Software Development Organizations

Many Open Source Software (OSS) communities has adopted peer code review as an effective quality improvement practice. The informal, regular, and tool-based code review process has been called ’modern code review’. There has not been much research on the modern code review process. This dissertation aims to model the this code review process adopted by the software organizations through 1)understanding, 2) improving, and 3) providing suggestions. I have planned seven steps to achieve the research goal, which includes literature review, exploring OSS code review practices, mining OSS code review repositories, comparing code review metrics across projects, surveying OSS code review participants, analyzing the effectiveness of peer code reviews to prevent security vulnerabilities, and social network analysis. So far, I have completed first three steps and made significant progress towards the next three steps. The research has contributed an empirical evidence that code review helps building accurate peer impressions between the code review participants. The planned future contributions include providing effective strategies to perform peer code review, evaluating the effectiveness of peer code review to prevent security vulnerabilities, and influence of project characteristics /social network structure on the peer code review process.