Dr. Christian (Chris) Bird, software researcher at Microsoft Research, discusses his paper and recent insights about code review at Microsoft. Chris shares with us how this study was one of the first to use developer interviews to understand the motivations and benefits of doing code review that go beyond code quality.  He also discusses the success of CodeFlow, a grassroots code review tool that saw widespread adoption across Microsoft and is widely used today.  He further muses how code reviews could be even more efficient and productive, and describes novel ideas around guided code reviews that could help developers do code reviews while working from home, and also how questions asked during code reviews could be leveraged to help generate documentation.  

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Code Review and Assessment,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020. 

In preparation for today's workshop,  we read/watched materials posted on this page. 

This Q&A is also available as a YouTube video.