Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

Spadini, D.; Palomba, F.; Baum, Tobias; Hanenberg, Stefan; Bruntink, Magiel; Bacchelli, A.

doi:10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110

Test-Driven Code Review

Title

Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

Author

Spadini, D. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Palomba, F. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Baum, Tobias (Leibniz Universität)
Hanenberg, Stefan (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
Bruntink, Magiel (Software Improvement Group)
Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich)

Date

2019

Abstract

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and advantages.

In this paper, we aim at empirically understanding whether this practice has an effect on code review effectiveness and how developers' perceive TDR. We conduct (i) a controlled experiment with 93 developers that perform more than 150 reviews, and (ii) 9 semi-structured interviews and a survey with 103 respondents to gather information on how TDR is perceived.
Key results from the experiment show that developers adopting TDR find the same proportion of defects in production code, but more in test code, at the expenses of fewer maintainability issues in production code. Furthermore, we found that most developers prefer to review production code as they deem it more critical and tests should follow from it. Moreover, general poor test code quality and no tool support hinder the adoption of TDR.
Public preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551217, data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2553139.

Subject

MSR
TDR
code review
software testing

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b275d9ed-47b7-432a-8d22-4e1456a9ff7c

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00110

Publisher

IEEE

ISBN

978-1-7281-0870-4

Source

Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019