Investigating code review quality: Do people and participation matter?

Authors: Oleksii Kononenko Olga Baysal Latifa Guerrouj Yaxin Cao Michael W. Godfrey

Venue: ICSME   2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), pp. 111-120, 2015

Year: 2015

Abstract: Code review is an essential element of any mature software development project; it aims at evaluating code contributions submitted by developers. In principle, code review should improve the quality of code changes (patches) before they are committed to the project's master repository. In practice, bugs are sometimes unwittingly introduced during this process. In this paper, we report on an empirical study investigating code review quality for Mozilla, a large open-source project. We explore the relationships between the reviewers' code inspections and a set of factors, both personal and social in nature, that might affect the quality of such inspections. We applied the SZZ algorithm to detect bug-inducing changes that were then linked to the code review information extracted from the issue tracking system. We found that 54% of the reviewed changes introduced bugs in the code. Our findings also showed that both personal metrics, such as reviewer workload and experience, and participation metrics, such as the number of involved developers, are associated with the quality of the code review process.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{oleksiikononenko2015icrqdpapm,
    author = "Oleksii Kononenko and Olga Baysal and Latifa Guerrouj and Yaxin Cao and Michael W. Godfrey",
    title = "Investigating code review quality: Do people and participation matter?",
    year = "2015",
    pages = "111-120",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)"
}

Plain Text:

Oleksii Kononenko, Olga Baysal, Latifa Guerrouj, Yaxin Cao, and Michael W. Godfrey, "Investigating code review quality: Do people and participation matter?," 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), pp. 111-120