A large-scale study of modern code review and security in open source projects
C Thompson, D Wagner - … of the 13th International Conference on …, 2017 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Predictive Models and …, 2017•dl.acm.org
Background: Evidence for the relationship between code review process and software
security (and software quality) has the potential to help improve code review automation and
tools, as well as provide a better understanding of the economics for improving software
security and quality. Prior work in this area has primarily been limited to case studies of a
small handful of software projects. Aims: We investigate the effect of modern code review on
software security. We extend and generalize prior work that has looked at code review and …
security (and software quality) has the potential to help improve code review automation and
tools, as well as provide a better understanding of the economics for improving software
security and quality. Prior work in this area has primarily been limited to case studies of a
small handful of software projects. Aims: We investigate the effect of modern code review on
software security. We extend and generalize prior work that has looked at code review and …
Background
Evidence for the relationship between code review process and software security (and software quality) has the potential to help improve code review automation and tools, as well as provide a better understanding of the economics for improving software security and quality. Prior work in this area has primarily been limited to case studies of a small handful of software projects. Aims
We investigate the effect of modern code review on software security. We extend and generalize prior work that has looked at code review and software quality. Method
We gather a very large dataset from GitHub (3,126 projects in 143 languages, with 489,038 issues and 382,771 pull requests), and use a combination of quantification techniques and multiple regression modeling to study the relationship between code review coverage and participation and software quality and security. Results
We find that code review coverage has a significant effect on software security. We confirm prior results that found a relationship between code review coverage and software defects. Most notably, we find evidence of a negative relationship between code review of pull requests and the number of security bugs reported in a project. Conclusions
Our results suggest that implementing code review policies within the pull request model of development may have a positive effect on the quality and security of software.