Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review

TL;DR

This paper explores interpersonal conflicts during code reviews, revealing their commonality, impact, and potential for constructive resolution, while emphasizing the need for tailored conflict management techniques.

Contribution

It provides a systematic qualitative analysis of developer perceptions of conflicts in code reviews and discusses the unique aspects and resolution strategies for such conflicts.

Findings

Conflicts are common and considered normal by developers.

Constructive conflict resolution can lead to improvements.

Conflicts are intertwined with code, developer, team, and organizational contexts.

Abstract

Code review consists of manual inspection, discussion, and judgment of source code by developers other than the code's author. Due to discussions around competing ideas and group decision-making processes, interpersonal conflicts during code reviews are expected. This study systematically investigates how developers perceive code review conflicts and addresses interpersonal conflicts during code reviews as a theoretical construct. Through the thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 22 developers, we confirm that conflicts during code reviews are commonplace, anticipated and seen as normal by developers. Even though conflicts do happen and carry a negative impact for the review, conflicts-if resolved constructively-can also create value and bring improvement. Moreover, the analysis provided insights on how strongly conflicts during code review and its context (i.e., code, developer, team, organization) are intertwined. Finally, there are aspects specific to code review conflicts that call for the research and application of customized conflict resolution and management techniques, some of which are discussed in this paper. Data and material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5848794