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Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title What happens in my code reviews? An investigation on automatically classifying review changes
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Enrico Fregnan
  • Fernando Petrulio
  • Linda Di Geronimo
  • Alberto Bacchelli
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Empirical Software Engineering
Publisher Springer
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 1382-3256
Volume 27
Number 4
Page Range 89:1 - 89:43
Date 2022
Abstract Text Code reviewing is a widespread practice used by software engineers to maintain high code quality. To date, the knowledge on the effect of code review on source code is still limited. Some studies have addressed this problem by classifying the types of changes that take place during the review process (a.k.a. review changes), as this strategy can, for example, pinpoint the immediate effect of reviews on code. Nevertheless, this classification (1) is not scalable, as it was conducted manually, and (2) was not assessed in terms of how meaningful the provided information is for practitioners. This paper aims at addressing these limitations: First, we investigate to what extent a machine learning-based technique can automatically classify review changes. Then, we evaluate the relevance of information on review change types and its potential usefulness, by conducting (1) semi-structured interviews with 12 developers and (2) a qualitative study with 17 developers, who are asked to assess reports on the review changes of their project. Key results of the study show that not only it is possible to automatically classify code review changes, but this information is also perceived by practitioners as valuable to improve the code review process.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/s10664-021-10075-5
Other Identification Number merlin-id:23373
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