Understanding and Leveraging Context in Code Review

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Code review, i.e., manual inspection of source code changes, is recognized to be one of the most effective QA practices in software development as it delivers benefits of identifying software defects and improving software quality. Many software companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Shopify, Mozilla) have employed code reviews extensively. However, due to the volume of submitted contributions and the need to handle them in a timely manner, many code review processes have become more lightweight and less formal in nature. This evolution of the review process increases the risks of letting defects slip into the code as reviewers are unable to detect all of them. One of the reasons for this failure to detect defects and, as a result, reduced software quality, can be attributed to poor understanding of the context surrounding the developer's working environment. The context in a software development setting, as defined by Gail Murphy, is the "information about the system under development and the environment and process in which the system is being developed". While previous research has extensively explored what factors, both social and technical, impact code review and its quality, the notion of context has not been considered. What kinds of context are relevant to code review? How can we capture, model, and explain various kinds of context to support code review tasks? What tools can we develop to use the context efficiently? This research program aims at understanding and leveraging the kinds of context that are relevant to code review to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. The goal of this work is twofold: 1) to better understand the context surrounding code review processes and practice by extracting, capturing, and modelling it from various development artifacts, and 2) to leverage this context to develop models, techniques, and tools to support developer daily tasks and activities. This research will significantly impact the Canadian software industry by making it more effective in their work processes. Developers will be better supported in completing their daily tasks as their tools will be better tuned to different kinds of context that are relevant to these tasks. By understanding and leveraging context in code review, we aim at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the process, increasing the quality of the software systems by reducing software defects, speeding up the development cycle, and improving the overall maintainability of the software systems.