Code Review Practices for Refactoring Changes: An Empirical Study on OpenStack

Eman Abdullah Alomar, Moataz Chouchen, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    15 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may discuss refactoring activities before merging code changes in the code base. To date, code review has been extensively studied to explore its general challenges, best practices and outcomes, and socio-technical aspects. However, little is known about how refactoring is being reviewed and what developers care about when they review refactored code. Hence, in this work, we present a quantitative and qualitative study to understand what are the main criteria developers rely on to develop a decision about accepting or rejecting a submitted refactored code, and what makes this process challenging. Through a case study of 11,010 refactoring and non-refactoring reviews spread across OpenStack open-source projects, we find that refactoring-related code reviews take significantly longer to be resolved in terms of code review efforts. Moreover, upon performing a thematic analysis on a significant sample of the refactoring code review discussions, we built a comprehensive taxonomy consisting of 28 refactoring review criteria. We envision our findings reaffirming the necessity of developing accurate and efficient tools and techniques that can assist developers in the review process in the presence of refactorings.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
    Pages689-701
    Number of pages13
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450393034
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2022
    Event2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022 - Pittsburgh, United States
    Duration: 23 May 202224 May 2022

    Publication series

    NameProceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022

    Conference

    Conference2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityPittsburgh
    Period23/05/2224/05/22

    Keywords

    • Refactoring
    • code review
    • developer perception
    • software quality

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