The COVID−19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital health solutions. This has presented significant challenges for software development teams to swiftly adjust to the market needs and demand. To address these challenges, product management teams have had to adapt their approach to software development, reshaping their processes to meet the demands of the pandemic. Brighsquid implemented a new task assignment process aimed at enhancing developer accountability toward the customer. To assess the impact of this change on code ownership, we conducted a code change analysis. Additionally, we surveyed 67 developers to investigate the relationship between accountability and ownership more broadly. The findings of our case study indicate that the revised assignment model not only increased the perceived sense of accountability within the production team but also improved code resilience against ownership changes. Moreover, the survey results revealed that a majority of the participating developers (67.5%) associated perceived accountability with artifact ownership.

Background: Code reviewing is an essential part of software development to ensure software quality. However, the abundance of review tasks and the intensity of the workload for reviewers negatively impact the quality of the reviews. The short review text is often unactionable. Aims: We propose the Example Driven Review Explanation (EDRE) method to facilitate the code review process by adding additional explanations through examples. EDRE recommends similar code reviews as examples to further explain a review and help a developer to understand the received reviews with less communication overhead. Method: Through an empirical study in an industrial setting and by analyzing 3,722 Code reviews across three open-source projects, we compared five methods of data retrieval, text classification, and text recommendation. Results: EDRE using TF-IDF word embedding along with an SVM classifier can provide practical examples for each code review with 92% F-score and 90% Accuracy. Conclusions: The example-based explanation is an established method for assisting experts in explaining decisions. EDRE can accurately provide a set of context-specific examples to facilitate the code review process in software teams.