What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review?

An Empirical Investigation on Code Change Reviewability

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

A.R. Keshav Ram University of Waterloo
A.A. Sawant Software Engineering - EEMCS
Marco Castelluccio Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
A. Bacchelli Universitat Zurich
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
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Published Date

2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

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].

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