What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review?

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What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review?

An Empirical Investigation on Code Change Reviewability

Conference Paper (2018)

Author(s)

Achyudh Ram (University of Waterloo)

Anand Ashok Sawant (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Marco Castelluccio (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)

Alberto Bacchelli (Universitat Zurich)

Research Group

Software Engineering

Code review Pull request Code quality

DOI related publication

https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3236080 Final published version

To reference this document use

https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8ebc82d2-45aa-4b39-a755-c49cfa78cac3

More Info

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Publication Year

2018

Language

English

Research Group

Software Engineering

Pages (from-to)

201-212

ISBN (print)

978-1-4503-5573-5

Event

ESEC/FSE 2018 (2018-11-04 - 2018-11-09), Lake Buena Vista, United States

Downloads counter

267

Abstract

Peer code review is a practice widely adopted in software projects to improve the quality of code. In current code review practices, code changes are manually inspected by developers other than the author before these changes are integrated into a project or put into production. We conducted a study to obtain an empirical understanding of what makes a code change easier to review. To this end, we surveyed published academic literature and sources from gray literature (e.g., blogs and white papers), we interviewed ten professional developers, and we designed and deployed a reviewability evaluation tool that professional developers used to rate the reviewability of 98 changes. We find that reviewability is defined through several factors, such as the change description, size, and coherent commit history. We provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers. Preprint [https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/45941832/reviewability.pdf]. Data and Materials [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1323659].