Will it pass? Predicting the outcome of a source code review

Abstract

It has been observed that allowing source code changes to be made only after source code reviews has a positive impact on the quality and lifetime of the resulting software. In some cases, code review processes take quite a long time and this negatively affects software development costs and employee job satisfaction. Establishing mechanisms that predict what kind of feedback reviewers will provide and what revisions they will ask for can reduce the number of times this problem occurs. Thanks to such mechanisms, developers can improve the maturity of their code change requests before the review process starts. In this way, when they start the review, the process may advance quickly and more smoothly. In this study, as a first step towards this goal, we developed a mechanism to identify whether a change proposal would require any revisions or not for approval.