How Does Modern Code Review Impact Software Design Degradation? An In-depth Empirical Study

Uchôa, Anderson; Barbosa, C. Hall; Oizumi, Willian; Blenilio, Publio; Lima, Rafael; Garcia, Alessandro; Bezerra, Carla I. M.

doi:10.1109/icsme46990.2020.00055

Cited by 34 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Later, Mcintosh et al [26] suggested that coverage, reviewers participation and expertise play high impacts on the code quality. Recently, Uchoa et al [27] found that long discussions and review disagreements increase design degradation. Ebert et al [6] found that missing rationale and lack of familiarity with the code are the major reasons for confusions in code review.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-patterns in Modern Code Review: Symptoms and Prevalence

Chouchen

Ouni

Kula

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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Modern code review (MCR) is now broadly adopted as an established and effective software quality assurance practice, with an increasing number of open-source as well as commercial software projects identifying code review as a crucial practice. During the MCR process, developers review, provide constructive feedback, and/or critique each others' patches before a code change is merged into the codebase. Nevertheless, code review is basically a human task that involves technical, personal and social aspects. Existing literature hint the existence of poor reviewing practices i.e., anti-patterns, that may contribute to a tense reviewing culture, degradation of software quality, slow down integration, and may affect the overall sustainability of the project. To better understand these practices, we present in this paper the concept of Modern Code Review Anti-patterns (MCRA) and take a first step to define a catalog that enumerates common poor code review practices. In detail we explore and characterize MCRA symptoms, causes, and impacts. We also conduct a series of preliminary experiments to investigate the prevalence and co-occurrences of such anti-patterns on a random sample of 100 code reviews from various OpenStack projects.Index Terms-Modern code review, review anti-pattern

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-patterns in Modern Code Review: Symptoms and Prevalence

Chouchen

Ouni

Kula

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…A key concern of all code review stakeholders, including code owners and reviewers, is to remain aware of ongoing changes impacting the design [90,21,70]. In fact, previous studies [40,159,160] have observed that during code reviews, the involved stakeholders identify changes that impact the design in a bottom-up way, i.e., they start by identifying poor code structures -also known as code smells -at the low level and not by the top-down way, i.e., from high-level to low-level design.…”

Section: List Of Tablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, such aspects can influence to which extent the degradation can be slowed down or accelerated. For instance, the quality of each code change might be influenced by the developer(s) working on it and the change process itself [21,15,60,90].…”

Section: List Of Tablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the prior studies revealing the influence of certain technical and social aspects in code reviews, none of them investigated to what extent these aspects can influence -either alone or simultaneously -the design degradation during code reviews. For instance, the quality of each code change might be influenced by the experience of developers working on it and the change process itself [15,21,60,90]. Consequently, these aspects can play a key role in how software design degrades.…”

Section: On the Impact Of Modern Code Review And Their Practices On Design Degradationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, no study has done so in the context of design degradation. In fact, their use to discriminate and predict design impactful changes has not been investigated in depth so far [73,90]. In this context, such metrics can act as indicators of design impactfulness of ongoing changes along the code review process [73].…”

Section: On the Impact Of Modern Code Review And Their Practices On Design Degradationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unveiling Social and Technical Facets of Design Degradation in Modern Code Review

UCHOA¹

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in 2016. Anderson has worked for Research & Development (R&D) projects in software engineering and information systems for healthcare, in collaboration with institutions from Brazil and the United Kingdom (UK). His collaborative work resulted in more than 25 peer-reviewed papers. Anderson collaborates with various researchers in Brazil (more recently, UFPR, UFPE, and UFC) and UK (Newcastle University). His main research interests are software gamification, code review, software reuse, software evolution, software maintenance, and human aspects.

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