Tue 6 Nov 2018 16:37 - 17:00 at Horizons 10-11 - Developer Studies Chair(s): Thomas LaToza

Peer code review is a practice widely adopted in software projects to improve the quality of code. In current code review practices, code changes are manually inspected by developers other than the author before these changes are integrated into a project or put into production. We conducted a study to obtain an empirical understanding of what makes a code change easier to review. To this end, we surveyed published academic literature and sources from gray literature (e.g., blogs and white papers), we interviewed ten professional developers, and we designed and deployed a reviewability evaluation tool that professional developers used to rate the reviewability of 98 changes. We find that reviewability is defined through several factors, such as the change description, size, and coherent commit history. We provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers. Public preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1323659]; data and materials [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1323659].

Tue 6 Nov

Displayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change

15:30 - 17:00
Developer StudiesResearch Papers / Journal-First at Horizons 10-11
Chair(s): Thomas LaToza George Mason University
15:30
22m
Talk
Programmers do not Favor Lambda Expressions for Concurrent Object-Oriented Code
Journal-First
DOI
15:52
22m
Talk
How Do Developers Utilize Source Code from Stack Overflow?
Journal-First
Yuhao Wu , Shaowei Wang Queen's University, Cor-Paul Bezemer University of Alberta, Canada, Katsuro Inoue Osaka University
DOI
16:15
22m
Talk
Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise
Research Papers
Sebastian Baltes University of Trier, Stephan Diehl Computer Science, University Trier, Germany
Pre-print
16:37
22m
Full-paper
What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review? An Empirical Investigation on Code Change Reviewability
Research Papers
Achyudh Ram University of Waterloo, Anand Ashok Sawant Delft University of Technology, Marco Castelluccio Mozilla Foundation, UK, Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich
Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached