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Revisiting Code Ownership and Its Relationship with Software Quality in the Scope of Modern Code Review | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Revisiting Code Ownership and Its Relationship with Software Quality in the Scope of Modern Code Review


Abstract:

Code ownership establishes a chain of responsibility for modules in large software systems. Although prior work uncovers a link between code ownership heuristics and soft...Show More

Abstract:

Code ownership establishes a chain of responsibility for modules in large software systems. Although prior work uncovers a link between code ownership heuristics and software quality, these heuristics rely solely on the authorship of code changes. In addition to authoring code changes, developers also make important contributions to a module by reviewing code changes. Indeed, recent work shows that reviewers are highly active in modern code review processes, often suggesting alternative solutions or providing updates to the code changes. In this paper, we complement traditional code ownership heuristics using code review activity. Through a case study of six releases of the large Qt and OpenStack systems, we find that: (1) 67%-86% of developers did not author any code changes for a module, but still actively contributed by reviewing 21%-39% of the code changes, (2) code ownership heuristics that are aware of reviewing activity share a relationship with software quality, and (3) the proportion of reviewers without expertise shares a strong, increasing relationship with the likelihood of having post-release defects. Our results suggest that reviewing activity captures an important aspect of code ownership, and should be included in approximations of it in future studies.
Date of Conference: 14-22 May 2016
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 03 April 2017
ISBN Information:
Electronic ISSN: 1558-1225
Conference Location: Austin, TX, USA

References

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