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Contribution Details
| Type | Conference or Workshop Paper |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Published in Proceedings | Yes |
| Title | Primers or reminders? The effects of existing review comments on code review |
| Organization Unit | |
| Authors |
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| Presentation Type | paper |
| Item Subtype | Original Work |
| Refereed | Yes |
| Status | Published in final form |
| Language |
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| ISBN | 9781450371216 |
| Page Range | 1171 - 1182 |
| Event Title | ICSE '20: 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering |
| Event Type | conference |
| Event Location | Seoul South Korea |
| Event Start Date | July 27 - 2020 |
| Event End Date | August 19 - 2020 |
| Place of Publication | New York, NY, USA |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Abstract Text | In contemporary code review, the comments put by reviewers on a specific code change are immediately visible to the other reviewers involved. Could this visibility prime new reviewers' attention (due to the human's proneness to availability bias), thus biasing the code review outcome? In this study, we investigate this topic by conducting a controlled experiment with 85 developers who perform a code review and a psychological experiment. With the psychological experiment, we find that ≈70% of participants are prone to availability bias. However, when it comes to the code review, our experiment results show that participants are primed only when the existing code review comment is about a type of bug that is not normally considered; when this comment is visible, participants are more likely to find another occurrence of this type of bug. Moreover, this priming effect does not influence reviewers' likelihood of detecting other types of bugs. Our findings suggest that the current code review practice is effective because existing review comments about bugs in code changes are not negative primers, rather positive reminders for bugs that would otherwise be overlooked during code review. Data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3653856 |
| Digital Object Identifier | 10.1145/3377811.3380385 |
| Other Identification Number | merlin-id:21598 |
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| Funders | SNF Project No. PP00P2_170529 |