The Effect of Checklist in Code Review for Inexperienced Students: An Empirical Study

Code review is believed to be an effective technique to remove defects in early development stage and improve software quality. Therefore, it is regarded as one of the basic skills of qualified software engineers. Consequently, most curricula for SE students incorporated knowledge about code review in different courses. However, how to teach students to conduct efficient code review remains challenging. Many reports claimed that using checklist during code review could increase review efficiency (percentage of defects removed in code review). Nevertheless, we found a quite different result through analyzing the data collected from a PSP course took by freshmen. Results indicate that checklist contributes more to helping beginners conduct code review than to improving review efficiency. This finding implies that educators need to properly recognize the role of checklist in code review for students and explore more approaches to help students master skills to conduct efficient code reviews.