Blogs (1) >>
ICSE 2019
Sat 25 - Fri 31 May 2019 Montreal, QC, Canada
Fri 31 May 2019 16:00 - 16:20 at Laurier - Code Reviews Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and advantages.

In this paper, we aim at empirically understanding whether this practice has an effect on code review effectiveness and how developers’ perceive TDR. We conduct (i) a controlled experiment with 93 developers that perform more than 150 reviews, and (ii) 9 semi-structured interviews and a survey with 103 respondents to gather information on how TDR is perceived. Key results from the experiment show that developers adopting TDR find the same proportion of defects in production code, but more in test code, at the expenses of fewer maintainability issues in production code. Furthermore, we found that most developers prefer to review production code as they deem it more critical and tests should follow from it. Moreover, general poor test code quality and no tool support hinder the adoption of TDR. Public preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551217, data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2553139.

Fri 31 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

16:00 - 17:20
Code ReviewsPapers / Journal-First Papers / Technical Track at Laurier
Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology
16:00
20m
Talk
Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical StudyTechnical TrackIndustry Program
Technical Track
Davide Spadini Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, Fabio Palomba University of Zurich, Tobias Baum Leibniz Universität Hannover, Stefan Hanenberg University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, Magiel Bruntink Software Improvement Group, Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
16:20
20m
Talk
Why Does Code Review Work for Open Source Software Communities?Technical Track
Technical Track
Adam Alami IT University of Copenhagen, Marisa Leavitt Cohn IT University of Copenhagen, Andrzej Wąsowski IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Pre-print
16:40
10m
Talk
Does Reviewer Recommendation Help Developers?Industry ProgramJournal-First
Journal-First Papers
Vladimir Kovalenko TU Delft, Nava Tintarev Delft University of Technology, Evgeny Pasynkov JetBrains GmbH, Christian Bird Microsoft Research, Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich
DOI Pre-print
16:50
10m
Talk
The Impact of Human Factors on the Participation Decision of Reviewers in Modern Code ReviewJournal-First
Journal-First Papers
Shade Ruangwan Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Patanamon Thongtanunam The University of Melbourne, Akinori Ihara Wakayama University, Kenichi Matsumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology
DOI Pre-print
17:00
20m
Talk
Discussion Period
Papers