Code Reviewer Recommendation for Architecture Violations: An Exploratory Study

Code review is a common practice in software development and often conducted before code changes are merged into the code repository. A number of approaches for automatically recommending appropriate reviewers have been proposed to match such code changes to pertinent reviewers. However, such approaches are generic, i.e., they do not focus on specific types of issues during code reviews. In this paper, we propose an approach that focuses on architecture violations, one of the most critical type of issues identified during code review. Specifically, we aim at automating the recommendation of code reviewers, who are potentially qualified to review architecture violations, based on reviews of code changes. To this end, we selected three common similarity detection methods to measure the file path similarity of code commits and the semantic similarity of review comments. We conducted a series of experiments on finding the appropriate reviewers through evaluating and comparing these similarity detection methods in separate and combined ways with the baseline reviewer recommendation approach, RevFinder. The results show that the common similarity detection methods can produce acceptable performance scores and achieve a better performance than RevFinder. The sampling techniques used in recommending code reviewers can impact the performance of reviewer recommendation approaches. We also discuss the potential implications of our findings for both researchers and practitioners.