Automatically determining whether a software change request will be approved

Abstract

In software projects, pushing software change request proposals through a code review process improves the quality and life time of the resulting software. Such processes sometimes take long periods of time and this reflects on the cost of the software development and the work satisfaction of developers negatively. The presence of mechanisms which can determine the types of revision requests the reviewers may request on a particular proposal can help a developer to prevent or reduce long code review cycles. This is because the developer can improve the revision further before starting the process to hear from the reviewers. In this study, as a first step towards this goal, we attempt to develop a mechanism that automatically determines whether a change proposal would be approved or undergo revisions.