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Code review for newcomers

Is it different?

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

V.V. Kovalenko Software Engineering
A. Bacchelli Universitat Zurich
Research Group
Software Engineering
Copyright: © 2018 V.V. Kovalenko, A. Bacchelli
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3195836.3195842
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Published Date

2018

Language

English

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Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

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.

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