Broadcast Based Peer Review in Open Source Software Development Projects

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 0:35

Peer review is seen as an important quality assurance mechanism in both industrial development and the open source software (OSS) community. The techniques for performing inspections have been well studied in industry; in OSS development, peer review practices are less well understood. In contrast to industry, where reviews are typically assigned to specific individuals, in OSS, changes are broadcast to hundreds of potentially interested stakeholders. What is surprising is that this approach works very well, despite concerns that reviews may be ignored, or that discussions will deadlock because too many uninformed stakeholders are involved. In this talk I will describe the multi-case study methodology we used to develop a theory of OSS peer review. We find that OSS reviews can be described as (1) early, frequent reviews (2) of small, independent, complete contributions (3) that, despite being asynchronously broadcast to a large group of stakeholders, are reviewed by a small group of self-selected experts (4) resulting in an efficient and effective peer review technique. While there are aspects of OSS peer review that are unique to this setting, we find many parallels with and potential areas of transfer into industry.