Abstract
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 to conduct a proper code review, to better understand this process and how research and tool support can make developers become more effective and efficient reviewers. Previous work has provided evidence that a successful code review process is one in which reviewers and authors actively participate and collaborate. In these cases, the threads of discussions that are saved by code review tools are a precious source of information that can be later exploited for research and practice. In this paper, we focus on this source of information as a way to gather reliable data on the aforementioned reviewers' needs. We manually analyze 900 code review comments from three large open-source projects and organize them in categories by means of a card sort. Our results highlight the presence of seven high-level information needs, such as knowing the uses of methods and variables declared/modified in the code under review. Based on these results we suggest ways in which future code review tools can better support collaboration and the reviewing task.
Highlights
Peer code review is a well-established software engineering practice aimed at maintaining and promoting source code quality, as well as sustaining development community by means of knowledge transfer of design and implementation solutions applied by others [2]
The work we present in this paper is complementary with respect to the ones discussed so far: we aim at making a further step ahead investigating the information needs of developers that review code changes with the aim of deepening our understanding of the code review process and of leading to future research and tools to better support reviewers in conducting their tasks
4.1 RQ1 - A Catalog of Reviewers’ Information Needs We report the results of our first research questions, which aimed at cataloging reviewers’ information needs in code review and assessing their diffusion
Summary
Peer code review is a well-established software engineering practice aimed at maintaining and promoting source code quality, as well as sustaining development community by means of knowledge transfer of design and implementation solutions applied by others [2]. In a typical code review process, developers (the reviewers) other than the code change author manually inspect new committed changes to find as many issues as possible and provide feedback that needs to be addressed by the author of the change before the code is accepted and put into production [6]. Modern code review is a collaborative process in which reviewers and authors conduct an asynchronous online discussion to ensure that the proposed code changes are of sufficiently high quality [2] and fit the project’s direction [26] before they are accepted. Code review tools allow the change author to include a textual description of the code change, with the aim to provide reviewers with more information on the rationale and behavior of the change. The fact that the change description is often not optimal strengthens the importance of the goal of our study: An improved analysis of developers’ needs in code review can provide benefits in terms of review quality [34]
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