Software engineering wastes - a perspective of modern code review

Abstract

Identification and eradication of waste are the principal emphases of lean thinking. Waste is defined as any activity that consumes resources but does not deliver any value to the stakeholder and it can also be demarcated as an impediment to process flow. Lean thinking has been applied in the software engineering domain concerning overall software development, however, still, there is a need to take action regarding waste identification and elimination concerning specific software engineering activities. This paper describes the wastes generated during Modern Code Review (MCR). MCR is a socio-technical software engineering activity and acknowledged as a lightweight process for defect identification, code improvement and software quality enhancement. It involves coordination and communication among multiple software engineers having different personalities, preferences, and technical skills, thus it can generate multiple types of wastes. Therefore, the study has two objectives that are to recognize and report various wastes generated during MCR and to map the identified MCR wastes on the existing software engineering wastes. Systematic Literature Review and grounded theory has been utilized to recognize and produce a unique list of the waste generated during MCR. The identified unique list of MCR wastes and their mapping on existing software engineering wastes are validated through software engineering experts. The study findings report 28 unique wastes out of which 25 wastes map to the existing software engineering wastes. However, 3 wastes such as negative emotions, inequality/biasness and insignificant feedback are not reported in the existing software engineering literature. The study will be useful for researchers to identify the wastes in same context or for other software engineering activities and to provide the strategies to minimize the generation of identified wastes.