Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

Pascarella, L. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Spadini, D. (Software Improvement Group)
Palomba, F. (University of Zürich)
Bruntink, Magiel (Software Improvement Group)
Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich)

2018-11

Contemporary code review is a widespread practice used by software engineers to maintain high software quality and share project knowledge. However, conducting proper code review takes time and developers often have limited time for review. In this paper, we aim at investigating the information that reviewers need
to conduct a proper code review, to better understand this process and how research and tool support can make developers become more effective and efficient reviewers.
Previous work has provided evidence that a successful code review process is one in which reviewers and authors actively participate and collaborate. In these cases, the threads of discussions that are saved by code review tools are a precious source of information that can be later exploited for research and practice. In
this paper, we focus on this source of information as a way to gather reliable data on the aforementioned reviewers’ needs. We manually analyze 900 code review comments from three large open-source projects and organize them in categories by means of a card sort. Our results highlight the presence of seven
high-level information needs, such as knowing the uses of methods and variables declared/modified in the code under review. Based on these results we suggest ways in which future code review tools can better support collaboration and the reviewing task. Preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1405894]. Data and
Materials [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1405902].

code review
information needs
mining software repositories

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f80c7da6-6215-4a89-b20d-d98a1a02c350

https://doi.org/10.1145/3274404

ACM Proceedings on Human-Computer Interaction, 2 (CSCW), 1-27

CSCW 2018, 2018-11-03 → 2018-11-07, New York City's Hudson River (Jersey City), New Jersey, United States

Acknowledgments: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642954 Accepted author manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 L. Pascarella, D. Spadini, F. Palomba, Magiel Bruntink, A. Bacchelli