The Need for Speed: Increasing the Code Review Velocity

One of the software industry’s critical goals is to increase code velocity. Code velocity is the speed at which code changes published for the code review are merged until they are committed to the intended destination branch. This thesis focuses on the part of the development process where engineers review and critique each other’s code (Modern Core Review) and how to shorten that period.We find a negligible correlation between the pull request size, composition, and time-to-merge. We identify two primary categories of time delays during the code reviews: (a) the wait time from the proposal of code changes until the first response and (b) the wait time between acceptance and merging. Our findings indicate that kernel code is the primary optimization target for increasing code velocity in the BSD family of operating systems.We discover no public evidence documenting the benefits of removing dead code from the active code bases. Similarly, no evidence demonstrates that fixing compiler warnings benefits the software project.We conduct a qualitative survey to study the code velocity-related beliefs and practices in place. We find that (a) the industry and open-source community hold a similar set of beliefs, (b) quick reaction time is of utmost importance, (c) time-to-merge is the essential code review metric to improve, (d) engineers do not see evidence of the benefits of increased code velocity for their career growth, and (e) the controlled application of the commit-then-review model can increase code velocity

Does Code Review Speed Matter for Practitioners?

Increasing code velocity is a common goal for a variety of software projects. The efficiency of the code review process significantly impacts how fast the code gets merged into the final product and reaches the customers. We conducted a survey to study the code velocity-related beliefs and practices in place. We analyzed 75 completed surveys from 39 participants from the industry and 36 from the open-source community. Our critical findings are (a) the industry and open-source community hold a similar set of beliefs, (b) quick reaction time is of utmost importance and applies to the tooling infrastructure and the behavior of other engineers, (c) time-to merge is the essential code review metric to improve, (d) engineers have differing opinions about the benefits of increased code velocity for their career growth, and (e) the controlled application of the commit-then-review model can increase code velocity. Our study supports the continued need to invest in and improve code velocity regardless of the underlying organizational ecosystem

Quantifying Daily Evolution of Mobile Software Based on Memory Allocator Churn

The pace and volume of code churn necessary to evolve modern software systems present challenges for analyzing the performance impact of any set of code changes. Traditional methods used in performance analysis rely on extensive data collection and profiling, which often takes days. For large organizations utilizing Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), these traditional techniques often fail to provide timely and actionable data. A different impact analysis method that allows for more efficient detection of performance regressions is needed. We propose the utilization of user mode memory allocator churn as a novel approach to performance engineering. User mode allocator churn acts as a proxy metric to evaluate the relative change in the cost of specific tasks. We prototyped the memory allocation churn methodology while engaged in performance engineering for an iOS version of application X. We find that calculating and analyzing memory allocator churn (a) results in deterministic measurements, (b) is efficient for determining the presence of both individual performance regressions and general performance-related trends, and (c) is a suitable alternative to measuring the task completion time

The Unexplored Terrain of Compiler Warnings

The authors' industry experiences suggest that compiler warnings, a lightweight version of program analysis, are valuable early bug detection tools. Significant costs are associated with patches and security bulletins for issues that could have been avoided if compiler warnings were addressed. Yet, the industry's attitude towards compiler warnings is mixed. Practices range from silencing all compiler warnings to having a zero-tolerance policy as to any warnings. Current published data indicates that addressing compiler warnings early is beneficial. However, support for this value theory stems from grey literature or is anecdotal. Additional focused research is needed to truly assess the cost-benefit of addressing warnings

The Unexplored Treasure Trove of Phabricator Code Reviews

Phabricator is a modern code collaboration tool used by popular projects like FreeBSD and Mozilla. However, unlike the other well-known code review environments, such as Gerrit or GitHub, there is no readily accessible public code review dataset for Phabricator. This paper describes our experience mining code reviews from five different projects that use Phabricator (Blender, FreeBSD, KDE, LLVM, and Mozilla). We discuss the challenges associated with the data retrieval process and our solutions, resulting in a dataset with details regarding 317,476 Phabricator code reviews. Our dataset11https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17139245 is available in both JSON and MySQL database dump formats. The dataset enables analyses of the history of code reviews at a more granular level than other platforms. In addition, given that the projects we mined are publicly accessible via the Conduit API [18], our dataset can be used as a foundation to fetch additional details and insights

Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects' lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of 283,235 code reviews that cover, on average, seven years' worth of development. Our main conclusion is that neither the passage of time or the project's size impact code velocity. We find that (a) the duration of various code review periods (time-to-first-response, time-to-accept, and time-to-merge) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla either becomes shorter or stays the same; no directional trend is present for Blender, (b) an increase in the size of the code bases (annually 3-17%) does not accompany a decrease in code velocity, and (c) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla, the 30-day moving median stays in a fixed range for time-to-merge. These findings do not change with variabilities in code churn metrics, such as the number of commits or distinct authors of code changes.Comment: 5 pages. To be published in Proceedings of MSR '23: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2023). May 15-16, 2023, Melbourne, Australi