Code review for newcomers

Code review for newcomers: Is it different?

Kovalenko, V.V. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich)

2018

Onboarding is a critical stage in the tenure of software developers with a project, because meaningful contribution requires familiarity with the codebase. Some software teams employ practices, such as mentoring, to help new developers get accustomed faster. Code review, i.e., the manual inspection of code changes, is an opportunity for sharing knowledge and helping with onboarding. In this study, we investigate whether and how contributions from developers with low experience in a project do receive a different treatment during code review. We compare reviewers' experience, metrics of reviewers' attention, and change merge rate between changes from newcomers and from more experienced authors in 60 active open source projects. We find that the only phenomenon that is consistent across the vast majority of projects is a lower merge rate for newcomers' changes.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f0d633b3-d1a7-4a04-872b-f4fc7576c0a4

https://doi.org/10.1145/3195836.3195842

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

978-1-4503-5725-8

CHASE'18: Proceedings 2018 the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, Part F137813

CHASE 2018, 2018-05-27, Gothenburg, Sweden

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 V.V. Kovalenko, A. Bacchelli