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U Owns the Code That Changes and How Marginal Owners Resolve Issues Slower in Low-Quality Source Code

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Enys MonesAuthors Info & Claims

EASE '23: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

Pages 368 - 377

https://doi.org/10.1145/3593434.3593480

Published: 14 June 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

[Context] Accurate time estimation is a critical aspect of predictable software engineering. Previous work shows that low source code quality increases the uncertainty in issue resolution times. [Objective] Our goal is to evaluate how developers’ project experience and file ownership are related to issue resolution times. [Method] We mine 40 proprietary software repositories and conduct an observational study. Using CodeScene, we measure source code quality and active development time connected to Jira issues. [Results] Most source code changes are made by either a marginal or dominant code owner. Also, most changes to low-quality source code are made by developers with low levels of ownership. In low-quality source code, marginal owners need 45% more time for small changes, and 93% more time for large changes. [Conclusions] Collective code ownership is a popular target, but industry practice results in many dominant and marginal owners. Marginal owners are particularly hampered when working with low-quality source code, which leads to productivity losses. In codebases plagued by technical debt, newly onboarded developers will require more time to complete tasks.

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Cited By

Borg MPruvost IMones ETornhill ACodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Increasing, not Diminishing: Investigating the Returns of Highly Maintainable CodeProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644471(21-30)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644471
Borg MGraziotin D(2024)Requirements for Organizational Resilience: Engineering Developer HappinessIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2024.338603541:4(14-18)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2024.3386035
Thongtanunam PTantithamthavorn C(2024)Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and Their Associations with Software Quality2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044(379-390)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044

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EASE '23: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

June 2023

544 pages

ISBN:9798400700446

DOI:10.1145/3593434

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 14 June 2023

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EASE '23

EASE '23: The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

June 14 - 16, 2023

Oulu, Finland

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Cited By

Borg MPruvost IMones ETornhill ACodabux ZGalster MSpinola R(2024)Increasing, not Diminishing: Investigating the Returns of Highly Maintainable CodeProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt10.1145/3644384.3644471(21-30)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644384.3644471
Borg MGraziotin D(2024)Requirements for Organizational Resilience: Engineering Developer HappinessIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2024.338603541:4(14-18)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2024.3386035
Thongtanunam PTantithamthavorn C(2024)Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and Their Associations with Software Quality2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044(379-390)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00044

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