I’ve written a lot about code reviews and I’ve done my share of experimentation in software engineering. When I started my career, using inspections (like Fagan-style code inspections) was the primary source of experimentation. It was how I learned to experiment, although I never experimented with code inspections.
So, when getting my hands on this article, I thought that this is just one of the same, but in a different context – whether guided reading actually improves effectiveness and efficiency of code review processes. The effectiveness and efficiency are measured in the standard way – using defects as the output of the review process. But, there is something new with this study.
First of all, this is a study done with professional developers. The authors have designed an experiment and employed professional, though junior, developers to conduct it. Second of all, this is an experiment in the context of modern code reviews (Git, Gerrit, that sort of thing). Third, the results are not that convincing any more.
I encourage you to read the entire paper, but let’s dive a bit deeper into some of the results. For example, the experiment found that it is not always the case that guidance is better. It provides more cognitive load (the reviewers need to understand the guidance as well as the code), and it can be downright misleading. It pays off for longer and more complex code fragments.
The experiment also found that the complexity of the actual guidance (checklist) plays an important role – shorter, less cognitively demanding lists, are preferred. This is an important finding as, to my best knowledge, no one has ever said that. Checklists and perspective-based reading techniques assumed that more extra information equals better results. This experiment says that a well-balanced information is better than more information. I know, seems kind of obvious when you think of that, but it was not really considered up until now.
Finally, the most significant factor, found in this experiment, was that it is the understanding of the code that makes a review better or worse, not the guidance. At least not the guidance on a general level (like “Are all data types declared correctly?”).
What I make out of that is that there is nothing that substitutes knowledge. If you want to get something done, you need to put the hours into this.
I know, kids may not like it….
