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Can Formal Methods Improve the Efficiency of Code Reviews?

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Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9681))

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Abstract

Code reviews are a provenly effective technique to find defects in source code as well as to increase its quality. Industrial software production often relies on code reviews as a standard QA mechanism. Surprisingly, though, tool support for reviewing activities is rare. Existing systems help to keep track of the discussion during the review, but do not support the reviewing activity directly. In this paper we argue that such support can be provided by formal analysis tools. Specifically, we use symbolic execution to improve the program understanding subtask during a code review. Tool support is realized by an Eclipse extension called Symbolic Execution Debugger. It allows one to explore visually a symbolic execution tree for the program under inspection. For evaluation we carefully designed a controlled experiment. We provide statistical evidence that with the help of symbolic execution defects are identified in a more effective manner than with a merely code-based view. Our work suggests that there is huge potential for formal methods not only in the production of safety-critical systems, but for any kind of software and as part of a standard development process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.gerritcodereview.com.

  2. 2.

    Available at http://www.key-project.org/eclipse/SED/ReviewingCodeEvaluation/examples.

  3. 3.

    http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5045582.

  4. 4.

    http://www.key-project.org/eclipse/SED/ReviewingCode.html.

  5. 5.

    The times measured for three of the participants were invalid and, therefore, excluded.

  6. 6.

    Detailed results are available at http://www.key-project.org/eclipse/SED/ReviewingCodeEvaluation/results.

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Acknowledgment

We thank all participants of the evaluation for their valuable time and feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Martin Hentschel, Reiner Hähnle & Richard Bubel

Authors
  1. Martin Hentschel
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  2. Reiner Hähnle
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  3. Richard Bubel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Reiner Hähnle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Erika Ábrahám

  2. University of Twente, Enschede, Overijssel, The Netherlands

    Marieke Huisman

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Hentschel, M., Hähnle, R., Bubel, R. (2016). Can Formal Methods Improve the Efficiency of Code Reviews?. In: Ábrahám, E., Huisman, M. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9681. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33693-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33693-0_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33692-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33693-0

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