A fine-grained taxonomy of code review feedback in TypeScript projects

Author(s)

Davila, Nicole ; Nunes, Ingrid ; Wiese, Igor

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING; v. 30, n. 2, p. 32-pg., 2025-03-01.

Abstract

Modern Code Review (MCR) is a practice software engineers adopt to improve code quality. Despite its well-known benefits, it involves non-negligible effort, and this has led to various studies that provide insightful information from MCR data or support the review activity. Even though some studies proposed taxonomies of MCR feedback, they either are course-grained or focus on particular technologies, typically Java. Besides, existing studies have focused on classifying the concerns raised by reviewers or the review changes triggered during MCR separately. In turn, we present a jointly in-depth qualitative study of code-level issues found and fixed during the code review process in TypeScript projects, a popular language among practitioners in recent years. We extracted and manually classified 569 review threads of four open-source projects on GitHub: Angular, Kibana, React Native, and VS Code. Our key contribution is a comprehensive and fine-grained classification of aspects discussed during MCR, categorized into four main groups: topic, review target, issue, and code fix. We also present an analysis of the actual outcomes of MCR in the projects and discuss the potential research directions. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 21/06662-1 - Turning Padawans into Jedis: using worked examples to improve the newcomer's skills in open software projects
• Grantee: Igor Scaliante Wiese
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants