Impact of Continuous Integration on Code Reviews

TL;DR

This study explores how automated continuous integration builds influence code review activities, revealing that successful builds promote review participation and that frequent builds sustain ongoing review efforts.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the impact of automated builds on code review dynamics, a relationship not thoroughly understood before.

Findings

Successful builds encourage new code review participation.

Frequent builds maintain steady review activity over time.

The proposed model predicts 64% of builds that trigger new reviews.

Abstract

Peer code review and continuous integration often interleave with each other in the modern software quality management. Although several studies investigate how non-technical factors (e.g., reviewer workload), developer participation and even patch size affect the code review process, the impact of continuous integration on code reviews is not yet properly understood. In this paper, we report an exploratory study using 578K automated build entries where we investigate the impact of automated builds on the code reviews. Our investigation suggests that successfully passed builds are more likely to encourage new code review participation in a pull request. Frequently built projects are found to be maintaining a steady level of reviewing activities over the years, which was quite missing from the rarely built projects. Experiments with 26,516 automated build entries reported that our proposed model can identify 64% of the builds that triggered new code reviews later.