Quality Gatekeepers: Investigating the Effects ofCode Review Bots on Pull Request Activities

TL;DR

This study examines how code review bots influence pull request activities and developer communication in open source projects, revealing increased merged PRs but decreased discussions and non-merged PRs, with insights from both quantitative analysis and practitioner interviews.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impacts of code review bots on project dynamics, combining regression analysis with practitioner insights to inform better bot integration strategies.

Findings

Increased monthly merged pull requests after bot adoption

Decreased non-merged pull requests and developer communication

Bots improve transparency and confidence in code reviews

Abstract

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze these effects, we investigate how several activity indicators change after the adoption of a code review bot. We employed a regression discontinuity design on 1,194 software projects from GitHub. We also interviewed 12 practitioners, including open-source maintainers and contributors. Our results indicate that the adoption of code review bots increases the number of monthly merged pull requests, decreases monthly non-merged pull requests, and decreases communication among developers. From the developers' perspective, these effects are explained by the transparency and confidence the bot comments introduce, in addition to the changes in the discussion focused on pull requests. Practitioners and maintainers may leverage our results to understand, or even predict, bot effects on their projects.