Not logged in.

Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title What Makes a Code Change Easier To Review? An Empirical Investigation on Code Change Reviewability
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Achyudh Ram
  • Anand Ashok Sawant
  • Marco Castelluccio
  • Alberto Bacchelli
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Page Range 643 - 654
Event Title 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)
Event Type conference
Event Location Lake Buena Vista, Florida
Event Start Date November 4 - 2018
Event End Date November 9 - 2018
Place of Publication New York, NY
Publisher ACM Press
Abstract Text 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].
Related URLs
Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/3236024.3236080
PDF File Download
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)
Funders Swiss National Science Foundation: SNF Project No. PP00P2_170529