Software design is a key concern in code review through which developers actively discuss and improve each code change. Nevertheless, code review is predominantly a cooperative task influenced by both technical and social aspects. Consequently, these aspects can play a key role in how software design degrades as well as contributing to accelerating or reversing the degradation during the process of each single code change’s review. However, there is little understanding about such social and technical aspects relates to either the reduction or the increase of design degradation as the project evolves. Consequently, the scarce knowledge on this topic helps little in properly guiding developers along design-driven code reviews. Our goal in this Doctoral research is three-fold: (1) to characterize the impact of code review and their practices on design degradation over time; (2) to understand the contribution of technical and social aspects to design degradation; and (3) to propose a conceptual framework to support design-decision making during code review. Our preliminary results show that the majority of code reviews had little to no design degradation impact, and that technical and social aspects contribute to distinguishing and predicting design impactful changes.

Anderson Uchôa is a third-year PhD student in Informatics at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Anderson holds a Master’s in Informatics from PUC-Rio (2019), and a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Brazil, in cooperation with Sapienza University of Rome (La Sapienza), Italy (2016). Anderson Uchôa is a member of the OPUS Research Group supervised by Prof. Dr. Alessandro Garcia, from the Software Engineering Laboratory of PUC-Rio. He has experience in the area of Software Engineering, working mainly on the following topics: Software Reuse, Software Maintenance and Evolution, and Empirical Software Engineering. He also worked for research projects in software engineering, information systems for healthcare, and data science. He also works on industrial projects at PUC-Rio. Relevant venues and journals have accepted his work for publication, such as the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), and Information Systems (IS). Anderson collaborates with various researchers in Brazil (more recently, UFPR, UFMG, UFPE, and UFC) and UK (Newcastle University and University College London).