Lemmy: Bestiverse
  • Communities
  • Create Post
  • Create Community
  • heart
    Support Lemmy
  • search
    Search
  • Login
  • Sign Up
RSS BotMB to Hacker NewsEnglish · 18 days ago

First Come First Served: The Impact of File Position on Code Review

arxiv.org

external-link
message-square
0
fedilink
4
external-link

First Come First Served: The Impact of File Position on Code Review

arxiv.org

RSS BotMB to Hacker NewsEnglish · 18 days ago
message-square
0
fedilink
The most popular code review tools (e.g., Gerrit and GitHub) present the files to review sorted in alphabetical order. Could this choice or, more generally, the relative position in which a file is presented bias the outcome of code reviews? We investigate this hypothesis by triangulating complementary evidence in a two-step study. First, we observe developers' code review activity. We analyze the review comments pertaining to 219,476 Pull Requests (PRs) from 138 popular Java projects on GitHub. We found files shown earlier in a PR to receive more comments than files shown later, also when controlling for possible confounding factors: e.g., the presence of discussion threads or the lines added in a file. Second, we measure the impact of file position on defect finding in code review. Recruiting 106 participants, we conduct an online controlled experiment in which we measure participants' performance in detecting two unrelated defects seeded into two different files. Participants are assigned to one of two treatments in which the position of the defective files is switched. For one type of defect, participants are not affected by its file's position; for the other, they have 64% lower odds to identify it when its file is last as opposed to first. Overall, our findings provide evidence that the relative position in which files are presented has an impact on code reviews' outcome; we discuss these results and implications for tool design and code review. Data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6901285

Comments

alert-triangle
You must log in or register to comment.

Hacker News

hackernews

Subscribe from Remote Instance

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
lock
Community locked: only moderators can create posts. You can still comment on posts.

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

Visibility: Public
globe

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

  • 586 users / day
  • 2.13K users / week
  • 4.29K users / month
  • 9.46K users / 6 months
  • 2 local subscribers
  • 2.21K subscribers
  • 27.6K Posts
  • 10.7K Comments
  • Modlog
  • mods:
  • patrick
  • RSS Bot
  • BE: 0.19.5
  • Modlog
  • Instances
  • Docs
  • Code
  • join-lemmy.org