Modern code review benefits-primary findings of a systematic literature review

Abstract

Modern Code Review (MCR) an effective quality assurance technique that can ensure software quality and customer satisfaction through the identification of defects, code improvement and accelerating the development process. It is an asynchronous and lightweight review process supported with review tools, for instance, Gerrit. It is a light version of Fagan's inspection process and has developed as a practice for opensource and industrial software development. Researches have been conducted in the context of MCR utilizing various data collection methodologies such as interviews, surveys and comment analysis from review tools. Besides defect detection, other benefits have been reported concerning MCR process adoption, for instance, knowledge sharing, team awareness, collaboration, etc. However, the team members involved in MCR activities are not aware of the benefits of MCR activities as the literature is dispersed. No, systematize study available reporting benefits concerning MCR. As a consequence, there is a lack of actual awareness of the adoption of the MCR process. Therefore, the objective of the study is to systematically analyze and report the benefits of the MCR process. Systematic Literature Review has been utilized to identify MCR benefits. Thematic analysis has been performed to group the identified benefits into the relevant themes. The themes and reported benefits are validated by the experts for their relevancy. The study findings report 54 unique benefits, grouped into 9 themes. This research has implications for the software industry, engineer and researchers. The industry can incorporate the MCR process widely, whereas software engineers being aware of the real benefits of MCR can provide their participation effectively in achieving those benefits in reality. In future, the researchers can extend this study by identifying more benefits in different research settings and by quantifying the reported benefits of MCR.