Improving Code Review with GitHub Issue Tracking

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how GitHub's Issue Tracker can be leveraged to enhance the code review process by encouraging regular reviews and community participation, ultimately aiming to improve software quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that utilizes GitHub's Issue Tracker to promote regular and community-involved code reviews, enhancing existing practices.

Findings

Increased review regularity improves code quality.

Community involvement leads to more thorough reviews.

Proposed approach fosters collaborative review culture.

Abstract

Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During the code review process, senior engineers monitor other developers' work to spot possible problems and enforce coding standards. One of the most widely used open-source software platforms, GitHub, attracts millions of developers who use it to store their projects. This study aims to analyze code quality on GitHub from the standpoint of code reviews. We examined the code review process using GitHub's Issues Tracker, which allows team members to evaluate, discuss, and share their opinions on the proposed code before it is approved. Based on our analysis, we present a novel approach for improving the code review process by promoting regularity and community involvement.