Code review consists of manual inspection, discussion, and judgment of source code by developers other than the code's author. Due to discussions around competing ideas and group decision-making processes, interpersonal conflicts during code reviews are expected. This study systematically investigates how developers perceive code review conflicts and addresses interpersonal conflicts during code reviews as a theoretical construct. Through the thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 22 developers, we confirm that conflicts during code reviews are commonplace, anticipated and seen as normal by developers. Even though conflicts do happen and carry a negative impact for the review, conflicts-if resolved constructively-can also create value and bring improvement. Moreover, the analysis provided insights on how strongly conflicts during code review and its context (i.e., code, developer, team, organization) are intertwined. Finally, there are aspects specific to code review conflicts that call for the research and application of customized conflict resolution and management techniques, some of which are discussed in this paper. Data and material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5848794
@article{arxiv.2201.05425,
title = {Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review},
author = {Pavlína Wurzel Gonçalves and Gül Çalıklı and Alberto Bacchelli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.05425},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Paper also published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) for the 25th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW 2022)