Contemporary Software Peer Review: Modern practices, fault prediction, and extraction of design decisions

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Peer review has been acknowledged as a software engineering best practice for over 35 years. It is fundamentally a quality assurance technique that relies on experts checking each other's work. Overly formal processes limit adoption of review practices and do not increase review effectiveness.Contemporary peer review encompasses a series of techniques that allow the review process to fit the development team and to be both lightweight and measurable by managers. Practitioners have driven the development of and tools that support contemporary peer review. While this style of review has been adopted in various forms in software firms, there has been no systematic study of it. Furthermore, the shift from synchronous paper-based review to asynchronous tool-supported review has left a rich archive of sophisticated discussion of software artifacts. The unstructured nature of this archive has meant that it has not been used for fault prediction and summarization of system history. I have developed a tool, ACER, that can accurately extract code elements, such as classes and methods, from freeform text and code snippets. My work will (1) systematically describe contemporary review to practitioners and researchers; (2) aid developers in isolating the vulnerable areas of a system and understanding system evolution. My research objectives are to1.1: conduct a systematic investigation of peer review in software firms, including AMD and Microsoft,1.2: adapt and validate contemporary review in new settings (DND),1.3: determine the impact of variations in review regime on software quality,2.1: use ACER to mine the content of review discussion to predict where review effort should be focussed,2.2: extract system evolution and design decisions from review discussions. My overarching goal is to advance software development as an engineering discipline and to help government and firms produce high-quality software on time and on budget.