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.

Publication Date

Spring 5-1-2022

Comments

© 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in MSR '22: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3527932

Document Type

Conference Paper

Department, Program, or Center

Software Engineering (GCCIS)

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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