TY - GEN

T1 - Do Explicit Review Strategies Improve Code Review Performance?

AU - Gonçalves, Pavlína Wurzel

AU - Fregnan, Enrico

AU - Baum, Tobias

AU - Schneider, Kurt

AU - Bacchelli, Alberto

N1 - Funding Information: A. Bacchelli, P. Wurzel Gonçalves, and E. Fregnan gratefully acknowledge the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation through the SNF Projects No. PP00P2_170529. P. Wurzel Gonçalves also acknowledges the student sponsoring support by CHOOSE, the Swiss Group for Software Engineering.

PY - 2020/6/29

Y1 - 2020/6/29

N2 - Context: Code review is a fundamental, yet expensive part of software engineering. Therefore, research on understanding code review and its efficiency and performance is paramount. Objective: We aim to test the effect of a guidance approach on review effectiveness and efficiency. This effect is expected to work by lowering the cognitive load of the task; thus, we analyze the mediation relationship as well. Method: To investigate this effect, we employ an experimental design where professional developers have to perform three code reviews. We use three conditions: no guidance, a checklist, and a checklist-based review strategy. Furthermore, we measure the reviewers' cognitive load. Limitations: The main limitations of this study concern the specific cohort of participants, the mono-operation bias for the guidance conditions, and the generalizability to other changes and defects. Full registered report: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5FPTJ; Materials: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11806656

AB - Context: Code review is a fundamental, yet expensive part of software engineering. Therefore, research on understanding code review and its efficiency and performance is paramount. Objective: We aim to test the effect of a guidance approach on review effectiveness and efficiency. This effect is expected to work by lowering the cognitive load of the task; thus, we analyze the mediation relationship as well. Method: To investigate this effect, we employ an experimental design where professional developers have to perform three code reviews. We use three conditions: no guidance, a checklist, and a checklist-based review strategy. Furthermore, we measure the reviewers' cognitive load. Limitations: The main limitations of this study concern the specific cohort of participants, the mono-operation bias for the guidance conditions, and the generalizability to other changes and defects. Full registered report: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5FPTJ; Materials: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11806656

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85093686106&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3379597.3387509

DO - 10.1145/3379597.3387509

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85093686106

SP - 606

EP - 610

BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2020

T2 - 17th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2020, co-located with the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2020

Y2 - 29 June 2020 through 30 June 2020

ER -