Factors Influencing Code Review Processes in Industry

Abstract

Code review is known to be an efficient quality assurance technique. Many software companies today use it, usually with a process similar to the patch review process in open source software development. However, there is still a large fraction of companies performing almost no code reviews at all. And the companies that do code reviews have a lot of variation in the details of their processes. We have performed a grounded theory study to clarify process variations and their rationales. The study is based on interviews with software development professionals from 19 companies. These interviews provided insights into the reasons and influencing factors behind the adoption or non-adoption of code reviews as a whole as well as for different process variations. We have condensed these findings into six hypotheses and a classification of the influencing factors. Our results show the importance of cultural and social issues for review adoption. They trace many process variations to differences in development context and in desired review effects.