On potential improvements in the analysis of the evolution of themes in code review comments

Context: The modern code review process is considered an essential quality assurance step in software development. The code review comments generated can provide insights regarding source code quality and development practices. However, the large number of code review comments makes it challenging to identify interesting patterns manually. In a recent study, Wen et al. used traditional topic modeling to analyze the evolution of code review comments. Their approach could identify interesting patterns that may lead to improved development practices.Objective: In this study, we investigate potential improvements to Wen et al.’s state-of-the-art approach to analyze the evolution of code review comments.Method: We used 209,166 code review comments from three open-source systems to explore and empirically analyze alternative design and implementation choices and demonstrate their impact.Results: We identified the following potential improvements to the current state-of-the-art as described by Wen et al.: 1) utilize a topic modeling method that is optimized for short texts, 2) a refined approach for identifying a suitable number of topics, and 3) a more elaborate approach for analyzing topic evolution. Our results indicate that the proposed changes have quantitatively different results than the current approach. The qualitative interpretation of the topics generated with our changes indicates their usefulness.Conclusions: Our results indicate the potential usefulness of changes to state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing the evolution of code review comments, with practical implications for researchers and practitioners. However, further research is required to compare the effectiveness of both approaches.