Data and Material for 'Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review'

Abstract

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 CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development; Software development process management.

Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review

“…This section presents our research questions and provides information on the employed analysis, ethics, and data storing besides the information on the interviews and characteristics of the 22 interviewed developers. Additional information and details on the methodology and other appendices are available in the supplementary material [82].…”