Test-Driven Code Review

An Empirical Study

Conference paper (2019)

Authors

D. Spadini Software Engineering - EEMCS
F. Palomba Software Engineering - EEMCS
Tobias Baum Leibniz Universität
Stefan Hanenberg Universität Duisburg-Essen
Magiel Bruntink Software Improvement Group
A. Bacchelli University of Zürich
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2019 D. Spadini, F. Palomba, Tobias Baum, Stefan Hanenberg, Magiel Bruntink, A. Bacchelli
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110
MSR Code review Software testing TDR
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Published Date

2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and advantages.

In this paper, we aim at empirically understanding whether this practice has an effect on code review effectiveness and how developers' perceive TDR. We conduct (i) a controlled experiment with 93 developers that perform more than 150 reviews, and (ii) 9 semi-structured interviews and a survey with 103 respondents to gather information on how TDR is perceived. 
Key results from the experiment show that developers adopting TDR find the same proportion of defects in production code, but more in test code, at the expenses of fewer maintainability issues in production code. Furthermore, we found that most developers prefer to review production code as they deem it more critical and tests should follow from it. Moreover, general poor test code quality and no tool support hinder the adoption of TDR. 
Public preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551217, data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2553139.

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