Leveraging Test Plan Quality to Improve Code Review Efficacy
In modern code reviews, many artifacts play roles in knowledge- sharing and documentation: summaries, test plans, and comments, etc. Improving developer tools and facilitating better code reviews require an understanding of the quality of pull requests and their artifacts. This is difficult to measure, however, because they are often free-form natural language and unstructured text data. In this paper, we focus on measuring the quality of test plans at Meta. Test plans are used as a communication mechanism between the author of a pull request and its reviewers, serving as walkthroughs to help confirm that the changed code is behaving as expected. We collected developer opinions on over 650 test plans from more than 500 Meta developers, then introduced a transformer-based model to leverage the success of natural language processing (NLP) tech- niques in the code review domain. In our study, we show that the learned model is able to capture the sentiment of developers and reflect a correlation of test plan quality with review engagement and reversions: compared to a decision tree model, our proposed transformer-based model achieves a 7% higher F1-score. Finally, we present a case study of how such a metric may be useful in experiments to inform improvements in developer tools and experiences.
Mon 14 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
11:00 - 12:30 | Empirical IResearch Papers / Industry Paper at SRC LT 51 Chair(s): Lingxiao Jiang Singapore Management University | ||
11:00 15mTalk | What Improves Developer Productivity at Google? Code Quality Industry Paper Lan Cheng Google, Emerson Murphy-Hill Google, Mark Canning Google, Ciera Jaspan Google, Collin Green Google, Andrea Knight Google, Nan Zhang Google, Liz Kammer Google DOI | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Understanding Why We Cannot Model How Long a Code Review Will Take: An Industrial Case Study Industry Paper DOI | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Are We Building on the Rock? On the Importance of Data Preprocessing for Code Summarization Research Papers Lin Shi ISCAS, Fangwen Mu Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiao Chen Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Song Wang York University, Junjie Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ye Yang Stevens Institute of Technology, Ge Li Peking University, Xin Xia Huawei, Qing Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences DOI Pre-print | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Leveraging Test Plan Quality to Improve Code Review Efficacy Industry Paper Lawrence Chen Meta, Rui Abreu Meta Platforms, Tobi Akomolede Meta Platforms, Peter Rigby Concordia University; Meta, Satish Chandra Meta Platforms, Nachiappan Nagappan Facebook DOI |