Abstract
Peer code review is a practice widely adopted in software projects to improve the quality of code. In current code review practices, code changes are manually inspected by developers other than the author before these changes are integrated into a project or put into production. We conducted a study to obtain an empirical understanding of what makes a code change easier to review. To this end, we surveyed published academic literature and sources from gray literature (e.g., blogs and white papers), we interviewed ten professional developers, and we designed and deployed a reviewability evaluation tool that professional developers used to rate the reviewability of 98 changes. We find that reviewability is defined through several factors, such as the change description, size, and coherent commit history. We provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers. Preprint [https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/45941832/reviewability.pdf]. Data and Materials [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1323659].
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | ESEC/FSE 2018 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering |
Place of Publication | New York, NY |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 201-212 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-5573-5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Event | ESEC/FSE 2018 : The 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering - Lake Buena Vista, United States Duration: 4 Nov 2018 → 9 Nov 2018 Conference number: 26th |
Conference
Conference | ESEC/FSE 2018 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Lake Buena Vista |
Period | 4/11/18 → 9/11/18 |
Keywords
- Code quality
- code review
- pull request