Supporting Quality In Test Code For Higher Quality Software Systems

Automated testing has become an essential process for improving the quality of software systems. Automated tests can help ensure that production code is robust under many usage conditions and that code meets performance and security needs. Nevertheless, writing effective tests is challenging and, unfortunately, often neglected. In the first part...

Primers or Reminders?: The Effects of Existing Review Comments on Code Review

In contemporary code review, the comments put by reviewers on a specific code change are immediately visible to the other reviewers involved. Could this visibility prime new reviewers' attention (due to the human's proneness to availability bias), thus biasing the code review outcome In this study, we investigate this topic by conducting a...

Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

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...

Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

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<br/>to conduct a proper code...

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

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...