An Exploratory Study to Identify Similar Patches: A Case Study in Modern Code Review

Due to the distributed nature of Modern Code Review (MCR) tools, developers risk submitting similar patches (i.e., patches that attempt to achieve similar objectives), which potentially causes extra efforts both for the contributors and reviewers. Although researches on other duplicate software artifact exist, there is no prior work that explores the impact of such similar patches in MCR. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the impact of similar patches on reviewing efforts in MCR. We extracted over 3,400 similar patches from the OpenStack project. Results of the exploratory study confirm that similar patches take just as much time and patch revisions as merged patches.

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