Abstract:The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code reviews? We investigate this hypothesis by triangulating complementary evidence in a two-step study.First, we observe developers' code review activity. We analyze the review comments pertaining to 219,476 Pull Requests (PRs) from 138 popular Java projects on GitHub. We found files … Show more
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