Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic know...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) pp. 1061 - 1072
Main Authors Spadini, Davide, Palomba, Fabio, Baum, Tobias, Hanenberg, Stefan, Bruntink, Magiel, Bacchelli, Alberto
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2019
Subjects
code review
Computer bugs
Graphical user interfaces
Inspection
Interviews
MSR
Production
Software
software testing
TDR
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Summary:Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and advantages. In this paper, we aim at empirically understanding whether this practice has an effect on code review effectiveness and how developers' perceive TDR. We conduct (i) a controlled experiment with 93 developers that perform more than 150 reviews, and (ii) 9 semi-structured interviews and a survey with 103 respondents to gather information on how TDR is perceived. Key results from the experiment show that developers adopting TDR find the same proportion of defects in production code, but more in test code, at the expenses of fewer maintainability issues in production code. Furthermore, we found that most developers prefer to review production code as they deem it more critical and tests should follow from it. Moreover, general poor test code quality and no tool support hinder the adoption of TDR. Public preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551217, data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2553139
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110