Visualisation of Code Changes for Code Review

Title

Visualisation of Code Changes for Code Review

 Author

Gasparini, Lorenzo (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor

Bacchelli, Alberto (mentor)
Finavaro Aniche, Mauricio (graduation committee)
Vilanova Bartroli, Anna (graduation committee)
Baum, Tobias (graduation committee)

Degree granting institution

Delft University of Technology

 Programme

Computer Science

 Date

2019-07-09

 Abstract

Code reviews are a widely adopted practice in software engineering that is proven to increase the quality of the code. Despite its evolution in the last decade, it still presents a number of challenges, such as understanding the changeset in review. In this thesis we research the usage of Software Visualisation paradigms to aid reviewers in the change-understanding process with a tool-based approach. Based on a survey of the code change visualisation and code navigation research areas, we devise a set of candidate prototypes of a cognitive support review tool, which we iteratively refine involving developers in the process. Through an online survey, we select one of them and build CHANGEVIZ, the implementation of our novel code review environment. The effectiveness of our approach is validated with a preliminary experiment in which developers perform change-review tasks in our review environment. The results suggest that the features incorporated by our tool are valuable for reviewers.

 Subject

software engineering
code reviews
software visualisation

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4253425a-8cc3-4469-85e3-0123dbb60713

 Part of collection

Student theses

 Document type

master thesis

 Rights

© 2019 Lorenzo Gasparini
Files
PDF Master_Thesis_f.pdf 2.12 MB
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