The fairness of peer review and insights from studies of open source: A Q&A with Daniel German Empirical Software Engineering Banter

Dr. Daniel German, a professor at the University of Victoria, talks about his many years conducting empirical research in open source.   

Daniel shares how the practices and challenges in open source provided many rich opportunities for research that are also relevant for industry, such as code review practices, the use of git for distributed version control, and intellectual property practices. While at the same time there are important differences between open source and industry, such as volunteer open source developers have more agency and freedom than paid developers, and the perils of assuming open source are representative of industrial projects.  He also talks about how his research on fairness in Open Stack required qualitative research methods to understand how many developers perceived peer review as unfair and leverages a fairness theory that can be used to understand and address unfairness in reviews in general.   

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Nov 27th, 2020. The Q&A was based on this talk   

This Q&A is also available on YouTube.