How is IF Statement Fixed Through Code Review? A Case Study of Qt Project

ISSREW 2017 : 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops, 23-26 Oct. 2017, Toulouse, FrancePeer code review is key to ensuring the absence of software defects. To improve the review process, many code review tools provide OSS(Open Source Software) project CI(Continuous Integration) tests that automatically verify code quality issues such as a code convention issues. However, these tests do not cover project policy issues and a code readability issues. In this study, our main goal is to understand how a code owner fixes conditional statement issues based on reviewers feedback. We conduct an empirical study to understand if statement changes after review. Using 69,325 review requests in the Qt project, we analyze changes of the if conditional statements that (1) are requested to be reviewed, and (2) that are implemented after review. As a result, we find the most common symbolic changes are ( and ) (35%), ! operator (20%) and -> operator (12%). Also, ! operator is frequently replaced with ( and )