A systematic literature review and taxonomy of modern code review

Davila, Nicole; Nunes, Ingrid

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2021.110951

Cited by 33 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In much of the existing literature, code review has been analyzed as a single activity [6]. However, the finding above indicates that there are differences in behavior between roles, such as between developers and architects, and levels of experience.…”

Section: Results and Emerging Themesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The utility, purpose and practices surrounding code review have been an increasing focus of research activity in recent years [6]. Studies have described the practice of code review (primarily in open-source projects [8,9] and at big companies [2,11]), and proposed new solutions to improve the code review process (e.g., reviewer recommendation [3], decomposition of changes [4]).…”

Section: Introduction and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

What's bothering developers in code review?

Söderberg

Church

Börstler

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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Section: Results and Emerging Themesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's bothering developers in code review?

Söderberg

Church

Börstler

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To ensure that we have enough historical data for our study, we seek large and popular open-source projects with a rich history of pull-based development. For this purpose, we rely on GitHub as a pioneer in supporting pull-based development and the largest open-source ecosystem [20], which has also been the subject of numerous code review studies [21,22]. To identify such projects, we use the number of stars as a proxy for the popularity of the projects [23] and retrieve the list of the top 1,000 most-starred projects.…”

Section: Studied Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests–A Mixed-Methods Study of 10 Large Open-Source Projects

Khatoonabadi

Costa

Shihab

2023

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Pull-based development has enabled numerous volunteers to contribute to open-source projects with fewer barriers. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of pull requests (PRs) with valid contributions are abandoned by their contributors , wasting the effort and time put in by both the contributors and maintainers. To better understand the underlying dynamics of contributor-abandoned PRs, we conduct a mixed-methods study using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We curate a dataset consisting of 265,325 PRs including 4,450 abandoned ones from ten popular and mature GitHub projects and measure 16 features characterizing PRs, contributors, review processes, and projects. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, we find that complex PRs, novice contributors, and lengthy reviews have a higher probability of abandonment and the rate of PR abandonment fluctuates alongside the projects’ maturity or workload. To identify why contributors abandon their PRs, we also manually examine a random sample of 354 abandoned PRs. We observe that the most frequent abandonment reasons are related to the obstacles faced by contributors, followed by the hurdles imposed by maintainers during the review process. Finally, we survey the top core maintainers of the studied projects to understand their perspectives on dealing with PR abandonment and on our findings.

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“…There has been little focus on the efficiency of code reviews in comparison to the wide range of studies on code review process. A systematic literature review on Modern Code Review (in the year 2021) identifies only 4 papers related to code review time out of the 139 studies used for detailed analysis [15]. The literature classifies review time into three categories: (i) review delay (time from the first review request submission to the first reviewer feedback), (ii) review duration (time from the first review request submission to the review conclusion), and (iii) review speed (rate of SLOC reviewed per hour).…”

Section: Literature Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining Code Review Data to Understand Waiting Times Between Acceptance and Merging: An Empirical Analysis

Kudrjavets¹,

Kumar²,

Nagappan³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Increasing code velocity (or the speed with which code changes are reviewed and merged) is integral to speeding up development and contributes to the work satisfaction of engineers. While factors affecting code change acceptance have been investigated in the past, solutions to decrease the code review lifetime are less understood. This study investigates the code review process to quantify delays and investigate opportunities to potentially increase code velocity. We study the temporal characteristics of half a million code reviews hosted on Gerrit and Phabricator, starting from the first response, to a decision to accept or reject the changes, and until the changes are merged into a target branch. We identified two types of time delays: (a) the wait time from the proposal of code changes until first response, and (b) the wait time between acceptance and merging. Our study indicates that reducing the time between acceptance and merging has the potential to speed up Phabricator code reviews by 29-63%. Small code changes and changes made by authors with a large number of previously accepted code reviews have a higher chance of being immediately accepted, without code review iterations. Our analysis suggests that switching from manual to automatic merges can help increase code velocity. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Open source model; Software evolution; Software libraries and repositories.

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A systematic literature review and taxonomy of modern code review

Cited by 33 publications

References 36 publications

What's bothering developers in code review?

What's bothering developers in code review?

On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests–A Mixed-Methods Study of 10 Large Open-Source Projects

Mining Code Review Data to Understand Waiting Times Between Acceptance and Merging: An Empirical Analysis

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