Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs. How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down

Czerwonka, Jacek; Greiler, Michaela; Tilford, J. M.

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.131

Cited by 51 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…They delay merging of code to the main branch by 1-2 days [45]. However, recent studies indicate that only one-fourth of code review comments relate to functional defects [6], [19], which raises questions whether developers perceive the effort spent in code review as beneficial. To better understand how developers view the importance of code review, the first research question is: RQ1: Why do developers consider code reviews important (or not important) for their projects?…”

Section: Importance Of Code Reviewmentioning

confidence: 97%

Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review: Insights from Open Source Development and Industrial Practice at Microsoft

Bosu

Carver

Bird

et al. 2017

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

126

125

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Many open source and commercial developers practice contemporary code review, a lightweight, informal, tool-based code review process. To better understand this process and its benefits, we gathered information about code review practices via surveys of open source software developers and developers from Microsoft. The results of our analysis suggest that developers spend approximately 10-15% of their time in code reviews, with the amount of effort increasing with experience. Developers consider code review important, stating that in addition to finding defects, code reviews offer other benefits, including knowledge sharing, community building, and maintaining code quality. The quality of the code submitted for review helps reviewers form impressions about their teammates, which can influence future collaborations. We found a large amount of similarity between the Microsoft and OSS respondents. One interesting difference is that while OSS respondents view code review as an important method of impression formation, Microsoft respondents found knowledge dissemination to be more important. Finally, we found little difference between distributed and co-located Microsoft teams. Our findings identify the following key areas that warrant focused research: 1) exploring the non-technical benefits of code reviews, 2) helping developers in articulating review comments, and 3) assisting reviewers' program comprehension during code reviews.

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Section: Importance Of Code Reviewmentioning

confidence: 97%

Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review: Insights from Open Source Development and Industrial Practice at Microsoft

Bosu

Carver

Bird

et al. 2017

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

126

125

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Median review times at Google are much shorter than in other projects [14,33,34]. We postulate that these differences are due to the culture of Google on code review (strict reviewing standards and expectations around quick turnaround times for review).…”

Section: A Truly Lightweight Processmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…The size distribution of changes is an important factor in the quality of the code review process. Previous studies have found that the number of useful comments decreases [11,14] and the review latency increases [8,24] as the size of the change increases. Size also influences developers' perception of the code review process; a survey of Mozilla contributors found that developers feel that size-related factors have the greatest effect on review latency [26].…”

Section: A Truly Lightweight Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modern code review

Sadowski

Söderberg

Church

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice

202

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Employing lightweight, tool-based code review of code changes (aka modern code review) has become the norm for a wide variety of open-source and industrial systems. In this paper, we make an exploratory investigation of modern code review at Google. Google introduced code review early on and evolved it over the years; our study sheds light on why Google introduced this practice and analyzes its current status, after the process has been refined through decades of code changes and millions of code reviews. By means of 12 interviews, a survey with 44 respondents, and the analysis of review logs for 9 million reviewed changes, we investigate motivations behind code review at Google, current practices, and developers' satisfaction and challenges.

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“…However, code reviews today still have the potential for being expensive and slow [4], especially in terms of the discussion size before a final decision is made. For example, Microsoft engineers raised concerns over modern code review workflows, stating that 'current code review best practice slows us down' [5]. Moreover, it is generally undesirable to have bloated reviewer comments in a review system [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Developer Commenting in Code Reviews

Hirao

Kula

Ihara

et al. 2019

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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Toshiki HIRAO †a) , Raula GAIKOVINA KULA †b) , Nonmembers, Akinori IHARA † †c) , Member, and Kenichi MATSUMOTO †d) , Nonmember SUMMARY Modern code review is a well-known practice to assess the quality of software where developers discuss the quality in a web-based review tool. However, this lightweight approach may risk an inefficient review participation, especially when comments becomes either excessive (i.e., too many) or underwhelming (i.e., too few). In this study, we investigate the phenomena of reviewer commenting. Through a large-scale empirical analysis of over 1.1 million reviews from five OSS systems, we conduct an exploratory study to investigate the frequency, size, and evolution of reviewer commenting. Moreover, we also conduct a modeling study to understand the most important features that potentially drive reviewer comments. Our results find that (i) the number of comments and the number of words in the comments tend to vary among reviews and across studied systems; (ii) reviewers change their behaviours in commenting over time; and (iii) human experience and patch property aspects impact the number of comments and the number of words in the comments.

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Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs. How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down

Cited by 51 publications

References 6 publications

Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review: Insights from Open Source Development and Industrial Practice at Microsoft

Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review: Insights from Open Source Development and Industrial Practice at Microsoft

Modern code review

Understanding Developer Commenting in Code Reviews

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