Towards debiasing code review support

Background: Current state-of-the-art established that cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how developers interpret it. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses supporting code review: developers’ accurate and objective code evaluation. Objective: This paper explores harmful cases caused by cognitive biases during code review and potential solutions to avoid such cases or mitigate their effects. Method: We design several prototypes covering confirmation bias and decision fatigue. We rely on a developer-centered design approach by conducting usability tests and validating the prototype with a user experience questionnaire (UEQ) and participants’ feedback. Results: Our interim findings show that some techniques could be implemented in existing code review tools as reviewers will accept them and help prevent behavior detrimental to code review. Conclusion: This work provides a first approach to treating cognitive bias in code review. The developed prototypes will evolve into fully functional tools, with an extensive evaluation with developers.

Conference paper