Contents 1 Introduction
Code review is the process by which peer developers inspect the code written by a teammate to assess its quality, to recommend changes and, finally, to approve it for merging [3]. Previous works have investigated code review from several perspectives. Some authors studied the factors influencing the likelihood of getting a patch accepted as the results of the code review process [5], [41], while others studied the reviewing habits of developers in specific contexts [34]. Several works focused on the benefits, motivations, and expectations of the review process. Most of these studies are qualitative in nature [2], [6], [33], and were conducted by surveying/interviewing developers or by inspecting their conversations in mailing lists or issue trackers of open source projects. Only a few researchers analyzed data from a quantitative perspective, mostly to assess the impact of code review on code quality (e.g., the relationship between code review and post-release defects) [4], [20], [24], [25].
