Understanding shared links and their intentions to meet information needs in modern code review:: A case study of the OpenStack and Qt projects

Abstract

Code reviews serve as a quality assurance activity for software teams. Especially for Modern Code Review, sharing a link during a review discussion serves as an effective awareness mechanism where “Code reviews are good FYIs [for your information].”. Although prior work has explored link sharing and the information needs of a code review, the extent to which links are used to properly conduct a review is unknown. In this study, we performed a mixed-method approach to investigate the practice of link sharing and their intentions. First, through a quantitative study of the OpenStack and Qt projects, we identify 19,268 reviews that have 39,686 links to explore the extent to which the links are ..