What do we know about Modern Code Reviews?
Modern Code Review is a quality assurance practice where a code change is reviewed by one or more reviewers [1]. The review feedback is sent to the author who then modifies the code based on the feedback and submits again. This process continues until the open source community or software organizations’ requirements are met and finally the changes are accepted or rejected [2]. Tools such as CodeFlow and Gerrit are used to facilitate the review process.
Research on Modern Code Reviews has been abundant in the last decade and a half. We have therefore produced a set of nine evidence briefings that summarize 146 research publications from 2005 to 2018.
What we don't know about Modern Code Reviews?
This is your chance to communicate to us your personal opinion on which modern code review research you find most interesting. By answering the survey, you can direct us (and research in general) towards the areas where more research is needed. As an added benefit, at the end of the survey, we identify the evidence briefing(s) that fit most your interest so you don’t have to read through all of them.
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This is your chance to communicate to us your personal opinion on which modern code review research you find most interesting. By answering the survey, you can direct us (and research in general) towards the areas where more research is needed. As an added benefit, at the end of the survey, we identify the evidence briefing(s) that fit most your interest so you don’t have to read through all of them.
Evidence Briefings on Modern Code Reviews
Each evidence briefing covers material on a particular main theme and subtopics therein.
Evidence Briefing 1: The impact of modern code reviews on product quality
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 14 studies that investigate the impact of modern code reviews on defect detection or repair, code quality, detection or fixes of security issues and software design.
Evidence Briefing 2: The impact of modern code reviews on human aspects
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 7 studies that investigate the impact of modern code reviews on teams’ understanding of the code, peer impression, knowledge dissemination, motivation to contribute and developers’ attitude.
Evidence Briefing 3: The impact of software development processes, patch characteristics, and tools on modern code reviews
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 11 studies that investigate the impact of software development processes, tool support, and patch characteristics on modern code reviews.
Evidence Briefing 4: Modern code reviews process properties
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 13 studies that observe the code review process and its properties.
Evidence Briefing 5: Modern code review performance and human factors
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 18 studies that investigate human factors and their relationship to modern code review performance.
Evidence Briefing 6: Modern code reviews and organizational factors
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 12 studies that investigate organizational factors and their relationship to modern code reviews.
Evidence Briefing 7: Support systems for modern code reviews (1)
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 23 studies that investigate support systems related to the usefulness, sentiment, order, and monitoring of modern code reviews.
Evidence Briefing 8: Support systems for modern code reviews (2)
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 20 studies that investigate support systems related to the understanding of code changes and managing code reviews.
Evidence Briefing 9: Support systems for modern code reviews (3)
This briefing reports scientific evidence of 28 studies that investigate support systems for the recommendation of reviewers, automation of reviews and code reviews on touch enabled devices.
References
[1] Baum, Tobias, Kurt Schneider, and Alberto Bacchelli. “On the optimal order of reading source code changes for review.” 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, 2017.
[2] Rigby, Peter C., and Christian Bird. “Convergent contemporary software peer review practices.” Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering. 2013.