Visualising Developer Interactions in Code Reviews

Code review is an auditing process in which all changes are reviewed by someone other than the author of the changes. Because of its diverse benefits, as demonstrated by multiple studies, it has been widely adopted in both industry and open source projects. Various studies have proposed techniques to recommend reviewers who can audit changes, but there is limited support for comprehending existing review pairs (i.e., pairs of change authors and reviewers). Without this understanding, development teams may struggle to distribute workloads effectively. For example, a development team might overlook a concentrated workload on a specific developer, potentially slowing down the overall development process. On the other hand, some developers may submit code review requests (pull requests), but fail to receive timely attention from their colleagues.