The Importance of Being Isolated: An Empirical Study on Chromium Reviews

As large scale software development has become more collaborative, and software teams more globally distributed, several studies have explored how developer interaction influences software development outcomes. The emphasis so far has been largely on outcomes like defect count, the time to close modification requests etc. In the paper, we examine data from the Chromium project to understand how different aspects of developer discussion relate to the closure time of reviews. On the basis of analyzing reviews discussed by 2000+ developers, our results indicate that quicker closure of reviews owned by a developer relates to higher reception of information and insights from peers. However, we also find evidence that higher engagement in collaboration by a developer is associated with slower closure of the reviews she owns. Within the scope of our study, these results lead us to conclude that peer review of code may have a distinct dynamic that is facilitated by developers working in relative isolation.