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Does code review really remove coding convention violations?

Han, D; Ragkhitwetsagul, C; Krinke, J; Paixao, M; Rosa, G; (2020) Does code review really remove coding convention violations? In: Proceeding of the SCAM 2020 : IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. (pp. pp. 43-53). The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Adelaide, SA, Australia. Green open access

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Abstract

Many software developers perceive technical debt as the biggest problems in their projects. They also perceive code reviews as the most important process to increase code quality. As inconsistent coding style is one source of technical debt, it is no surprise that coding convention violations can lead to patch rejection during code review. However, as most research has focused on developer's perception, it is not clear whether code reviews actually prevent the introduction of coding convention violations and the corresponding technical debt.Therefore, we investigated how coding convention violations are introduced, addressed, and removed during code review by developers. To do this, we analysed 16,442 code review requests from four projects of the Eclipse community for the introduction of convention violations. Our result shows that convention violations accumulate as code size increases despite changes being reviewed. We also manually investigated 1,268 code review requests in which convention violations disappear and observed that only a minority of them have been removed because a convention violation has been flagged in a review comment. The investigation results also highlight that one can speed up the code review process by adopting tools for code convention violation detection.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Does code review really remove coding convention violations?
Event: 20th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
Dates: 27 September 2020 - 28 September 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7281-9248-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-7281-9249-9
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00010.
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00010
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10110634
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