A study of the quality-impacting practices of modern code review at Sony mobile
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
Nowadays, a flexible, lightweight variant of the code review process (i.e., the practice of having other team members critique software changes) is adopted by open source and proprietary software projects. While this flexibility is a blessing (e.g., enabling code reviews to span the globe), it does not mandate minimum review quality criteria like the formal code inspections of the past. Recent work shows that lax reviewing can impact the quality of open source systems. In this paper, we investigate the impact that code reviewing practices have on the quality of a proprietary system that is developed by Sony Mobile. We begin by replicating open source analyses of the relationship between software quality (as approximated by post-release defect-proneness) and: (1) code review coverage, i.e., the proportion of code changes that have been reviewed and (2) code review participation, i.e., the degree of reviewer involvement in the code review process. We also perform a qualitative analysis, with a survey of 93 stakeholders, semi-structured interviews with 15 stakeholders, and a follow-up survey of 25 senior engineers. Our results indicate that while past measures of review coverage and participation do not share a relationship with defect-proneness at Sony Mobile, reviewing measures that are aware of the Sony Mobile development context are associated with defect-proneness. Our results have lead to improvements of the Sony Mobile code review process.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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