Abstract
In contemporary code review, the comments put by reviewers on a specific code change are immediately visible to the other reviewers involved. Could this visibility prime new reviewers' attention (due to the human's proneness to availability bias), thus biasing the code review outcome In this study, we investigate this topic by conducting a controlled experiment with 85 developers who perform a code review and a psychological experiment. With the psychological experiment, we find that 70% of participants are prone to availability bias. However, when it comes to the code review, our experiment results show that participants are primed only when the existing code review comment is about a type of bug that is not normally considered; when this comment is visible, participants are more likely to find another occurrence of this type of bug. Moreover, this priming effect does not influence reviewers' likelihood of detecting other types of bugs. Our findings suggest that the current code review practice is effective because existing review comments about bugs in code changes are not negative primers, rather positive reminders for bugs that would otherwise be overlooked during code review. Data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Proceedings - 2020 ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2020 |
Pages | 1171-1182 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450371216 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: ICSE 2020 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of Duration: 27 Jun 2020 → 19 Jul 2020 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering |
---|---|
ISSN (Print) | 0270-5257 |
Conference
Conference | 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering |
---|---|
Country/Territory | Korea, Republic of |
City | Seoul |
Period | 27/06/20 → 19/07/20 |
Other | Virtual/online event due to COVID-19 online presentations |
Keywords
- Availability heuristic
- Code review
- Priming
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Primers or Reminders? The Effects of Existing Review Comments on Code Review'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
-
Dataset of "Primers or Reminders? The Effects of Existing Review Comments on Code Review"
Spadini, D. (Creator), Calikli, G. (Creator) & Bacchelli, A. (Creator), Zenodo, 20 Jan 2020
Dataset/Software: Dataset