Patch Reviewer Recommendation in OSS Projects

In an Open Source Software (OSS) project, many developers contribute by submitting source code patches. To maintain the quality of the code, certain experienced developers review each patch before it can be applied or committed. Ideally, within a short amount of time after its submission, a patch is assigned to a reviewer and reviewed. In the real world, however, many large and active OSS projects evolve at a rapid pace and the core developers can get swamped with a large number of patches to review. Furthermore, since these core members may not always be available or may choose to leave the project, it can be challenging, at times, to find a good reviewer for a patch. In this paper, we propose a graph-based method to automatically recommend the most suitable reviewers for a patch. To evaluate our method, we conducted experiments to predict the developers who will apply new changes to the source code in the Eclipse project. Our method achieved an average recall of 0.84 for top-5 predictions and a recall of 0.94 for top-10 predictions.