When Testing Meets Code Review: Why and How Developers Review Tests

Spadini, D.; Aniche, Maurício; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Bruntink, Magiel; Bacchelli, A.

doi:10.1145/3180155.3180192

When Testing Meets Code Review

Title

When Testing Meets Code Review: Why and How Developers Review Tests

Author

Spadini, D. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Aniche, Maurício (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Storey, Margaret-Anne (University of Victoria)
Bruntink, Magiel (Software Improvement Group)
Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich)

Date

2018

Abstract

Automated testing is considered an essential process for ensuring software quality. However, writing and maintaining high-quality test code is challenging and frequently considered of secondary importance. For production code, many open source and industrial software projects employ code review, a well-established software quality practice, but the question remains whether and how code review is also used for ensuring the quality of test code. The aim of this research is to answer this question and to increase our understanding of what developers think and do when it comes to reviewing test code. We conducted both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze more than 300,000 code reviews, and interviewed 12 developers about how they review test files. This work resulted in an overview of current code reviewing practices, a set of identified obstacles limiting the review of test code, and a set of issues that developers would like to see improved in code review tools. The study reveals that reviewing test files is very different from reviewing production files, and that the navigation within the review itself is one of the main issues developers currently face. Based on our findings, we propose a series of recommendations and suggestions for the design of tools and future research.

Subject

software testing
automated testing
code review
Gerrit

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:256e7d56-352f-44ae-919b-97fad0eafe69

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180192

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY

ISBN

978-1-4503-5638-1

Source

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '18