Using nudges to accelerate code reviews at scale
Qianhua Shan, David S. Sukhdeo, Qianying Huang, Seth Rogers, Lawrence Chen, Elise Paradis, Peter C. Rigby, Nachiappan Nagappan · Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering · 2022
We describe a large-scale study to reduce the amount of time code review takes. Each quarter at Meta we survey developers. Combining sentiment data from a developer experience survey and telemetry data from our diff review tool, we address, “When does a diff review feel too slow?” From the sentiment data alone, we learn that 84.7% of developers are satisfied with the time their diffs spend in review. By enriching the survey results with telemetry for each respondent, we determined that sentiment is closely associated with the 75th percentile time in review for that respondent’s diffs, ie those that take more than 24 hours.