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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title On the Optimal Order of Reading Source Code Changes for Review
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Tobias Baum
  • Kurt Schneider
  • Alberto Bacchelli
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-5386-0992-7
Page Range 329 - 340
Event Title 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Event Type conference
Event Location Shanghai, China
Event Start Date September 17 - 2017
Event End Date September 22 - 2017
Publisher IEEE
Abstract Text Change-based code review, e.g., in the form of pull requests, is the dominant style of code review in practice. An important option to improve review's efficiency is cognitive support for the reviewer. Nevertheless, review tools present the change parts under review sorted in alphabetical order of file path, thus leaving the effort of understanding the construction, connections, and logic of the changes on the reviewer. This leads to the question: How should a code review tool order the parts of a code change to best support the reviewer? We answer this question with a middle-range theory, which we generated inductively in a mixed methods study, based on interviews, an online survey, and existing findings from related areas. Our results indicate that an optimal order is mainly an optimal grouping of the change parts by relatedness. We present our findings as a collection of principles and formalize them as a partial order relation among review orders.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICSME.2017.28
Other Identification Number merlin-id:15587
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Funders Alberto Bacchelli's contribution is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the SNF Project No. PP00P2_170529.