Barriers for Students During Code Change Comprehension

Abstract

Modern code review (MCR) is a key practice for many software engineering organizations, so undergraduate software engineering courses often teach some form of it to prepare students. However, research on MCR describes how many its professional implementations can fail, to say nothing on how these barriers manifest under students' particular contexts. To uncover barriers students face when evaluating code changes during review, we combine interviews and surveys with an observational study. In a junior-level software engineering course, we first interviewed 29 undergraduate students about their experiences in code review. Next, we performed an observational study that presented 44 students from the same course with eight code change comprehension activities. These activities provided students with pull requests of potential refactorings in a familiar code base, collecting feedback on accuracy and challenges. This was followed by a reflection survey.