Do code review practices impact design quality? A case study of the Qt, VTK, and ITK projects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Code review is the process of having other team members examine changes to a software system in order to evaluate its technical content and quality. A lightweight variant of this practice, often referred to as Modern Code Review (MCR), is widely adopted by software organizations today. Previous studies have established a relation between the practice of code review and the occurrence of post-release bugs. While the prior work studies the impact of code review practices on software release quality, it is still unclear what impact code review practices have on software design quality. Therefore, using the occurrence of 7 different types of anti-patterns (i.e., poor solutions to design and implementation problems) as a proxy for software design quality, we set out to investigate the relationship between code review practices and software design quality. Through a case study of the Qt, VTK and ITK open source projects, we find that software components with low review coverage or low review participation are often more prone to the occurrence of anti-patterns than those components with more active code review practices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it