Only Time Will Tell: Modelling Information Diffusion in Code Review with Time-Varying Hypergraphs
Michael Dorner, Darja Šmite, Daniel Méndez, Krzysztof Wnuk, Jacek Czerwonka · 2022
Background: Modern code review is expected to facilitate knowledge sharing: All relevant information, the collective expertise, and meta-information around the code change and its context become evident, transparent, and explicit in the corresponding code review discussion. The discussion participants can leverage this information in the following code reviews; the information diffuses through the communication network that emerges from code review. Traditional time-aggregated graphs fall short in rendering information diffusion as those models ignore the temporal order of the information exchange: Information can only be passed on if it is available in the first place.