Does code review really remove coding convention violations?

Abstract

Many software developers perceive technical debt as the biggest problems in their projects. They also perceive code reviews as the most important process to increase code quality. As inconsistent coding style is one source of technical debt, it is no surprise that coding convention violations can lead to patch rejection during code review. However, as most research has focused on developer's perception, it is not clear whether code reviews actually prevent the introduction of coding convention violations and the corresponding technical debt.Therefore, we investigated how coding convention violations are introduced, addressed, and removed during code review by developers. To do this, we analysed 16,442 code review requests from four projects of the Eclipse community for the introduction of convention violations. Our result shows that convention violations accumulate as code size increases despite changes being reviewed. We also manually investigated 1,268 code review requests in which convention violations disappear and observed that only a minority of them have been removed because a convention violation has been flagged in a review comment. The investigation results also highlight that one can speed up the code review process by adopting tools for code convention violation detection.

Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and Practice

“…An investigation on the impact of code review on coding convention violation found that convention violations disappear after code reviews. However, only a minority of the violations were removed, because they were flagged in a review comment [119]. The comparison of cost required to produce quality programs using code reviews and pair programming showed that code reviews costs 28% less compared to pair programming [233].…”

Ethics in the mining of software repositories

“…The first case study project's aim was to create a dataset of code reviews and the state of the software projects at the time of each code review to allow investigations about how code review impacts software projects. Not only was the dataset directly used in multiple projects (Paixão et al 2017(Paixão et al , 2019Han et al 2020;Paixão et al 2020), but it was created as a curated and reusable dataset that could be made publicly available (Paixão et al 2018). The case study serves as an example of ethics considerations when creating a dataset for public reuse.…”