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On the Need for a New Generation of Code Review Tools

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10027))

Abstract

Tool support for change-based code review is gaining widespread acceptance in the industry. This indicates that the current generation of tools is well-aligned to current code review practices. Nevertheless, we believe that further improvements in code review tooling can lead to increased review efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we combine results from a qualitative study and results from the literature to substantiate this claim. We derive promising improvement areas and provide an overview of existing research in these areas. A common attribute of these improvements is that they trade flexibility for reviewer support. As flexibility is one of the main characteristics of the current generation of code review tools in Hedberg’s classification of review tool generations, we regard these coming tools as part of a new generation of code review tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.agilereview.org.

  3. 3.

    https://www.eclipse.org/egerrit/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.gerritcodereview.com.

  5. 5.

    https://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible.

  6. 6.

    https://smartbear.com/product/collaborator/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FG Software Engineering, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Tobias Baum & Kurt Schneider

Authors
  1. Tobias Baum
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  2. Kurt Schneider
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Baum .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Pekka Abrahamsson

  2. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Andreas Jedlitschka

  3. and Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Anh Nguyen Duc

  4. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Michael Felderer

  5. Okayama Prefectural University, Soja, Japan

    Sousuke Amasaki

  6. Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

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Baum, T., Schneider, K. (2016). On the Need for a New Generation of Code Review Tools. In: Abrahamsson, P., Jedlitschka, A., Nguyen Duc, A., Felderer, M., Amasaki, S., Mikkonen, T. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10027. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49093-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49094-6

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