Using Knowledge Units of Programming Languages to Recommend Reviewers for Pull Requests: An Empirical Study

Code review is a key element of quality assurance in software development. Determining the right reviewer for a given code change requires understanding the characteristics of the changed code, identifying the skills of each potential reviewer (expertise profile), and finding a good match between the two. To facilitate this task, we design a code reviewer recommender that operates on the knowledge units (KUs) of a programming language. We define a KU as a cohesive set of key capabilities that are offered by one or more building blocks of a given programming language. We operationalize our KUs using certification exams for the Java programming language. We detect KUs from 10 actively maintained Java projects from GitHub, spanning 290K commits and 65K pull requests (PRs). Next, we generate developer expertise profiles based on the detected KUs. Finally, these KU-based expertise profiles are used to build a code reviewer recommender (KUREC). In RQ1, we observe that KUREC performs as well as the top-performing baseline recommender (RF). From a practical standpoint, we highlight that KUREC's performance is more stable (lower interquartile range) than that of RF, thus making it more consistent and potentially more trustworthy. Next, in RQ2 we design three new recommenders by combining KUREC with our baseline recommenders. These new combined recommenders outperform both KUREC and the individual baselines. Finally, in RQ3 we evaluate how reasonable the recommendations from KUREC and the combined recommenders are when those deviate from the ground truth. Taking together the results from all RQs, we conclude that KUREC and one of the combined recommenders (AD_FREQ) are overall superior to the baseline recommenders that we studied. Future work in the area should thus (i) consider KU-based recommenders as baselines and (ii) experiment with combined recommenders.