Communicative Intention in Code Review Questions

Abstract

During code review, developers request clarifications, suggest improvements, or ask for explanations about the rationale behind the implementation choices. We envision the emergence of tools to support developers during code review based on the automatic analysis of the argumentation structure and communicative intentions conveyed by developers' comments. As a preliminary step towards this goal, we conducted an exploratory case study by manually classifying 499 questions extracted from 399 Android code reviews to understand the real communicative intentions they convey. We observed that the majority of questions actually serve information seeking goals. Still, they represent less than half of the annotated sample, with other questions being used to serve a wider variety of developers' communication goals, including suggestions, request for action, and criticism. Based on our findings we formulate hypotheses on communicative intentions in code reviews that should be confirmed or rejected by follow-up studies.

Assessment of off-the-shelf SE-specific sentiment analysis tools: An extended replication study

“…It is the case, for example, of suggestions formulated as questions, as in "Would IE user agent sniffing be a bad idea?," where the presence of negative lexicon (i.e., bad) causes misclassification of this neutral text as negative. This is in line with previous research showing how developers use questions to express emotional lexicon in order to induce critical reflection in the interlocutor, to express criticism but also actual emotions, such as anger or surprise, as well as to communicate perplexity or disagreement with respect to the implemented solution (Ebert et al 2018). Being able to identify the actual communicative intention of a questions is not a trivial task.…”

The Silent Helper: The Impact of Continuous Integration on Code Reviews

“…As discussed above, during a pull request review the communication between the author and the reviewers is very important. The comments give the author a chance to justify their proposed changes, and enable reviewers to express doubts, or to request changes, to the change set under review [41]. However, with the introduction of continuous integration the status of some aspects of the pull request under review is communicated by the CI service and the different signals associated with it on GITHUB.…”

A Systematic Literature Review and Taxonomy of Modern Code Review

“…These studies explored the comments made by reviewers. We identified three examined aspects: (i) content information [3,40,47,48,70,79,64,97,100,102,94,103,86,88,91]; (ii) size, typically in terms of amount of comments [69,39,80,55,46,18,45,84,94,98]; and (iii) quality, in terms of, e.g., usefulness [21,34].…”

“…However, when design issues are raised in the review feedback, they are considered constructive, offering alternative solutions. Moreover, two studies [86,91] specifically analyzed the questions and answers in the review feedback to identify the information that reviewers need and their communicative intentions. As contributions, both studies found that questions are used to ask an action of the author related to a suggestion of an alternative solution.…”