Terms

This page lists some of the common terms and definitions used in the Benchmarks, Insights and Advanced Metrics Pages

The following are terms commonly used in connection to Metrics, Benchmarks, and Insights:

Code Review - A method of submitting changes made in software to a peer review critique process, usually focused on code simplification, correctness, and bug elimination.

Merge - The creation of a new node is source control software that includes one or more changes from separate sources. This usually involves either a manual or automated process of splicing together code changes from multiple parallel development efforts.

Merge Request (Pull Request as popularized by the Github) - A known pattern for performing code review in the git source control software. In this pattern an author submits changes for a code review by requesting on a centralized platform that a pull operation(merge to HEAD) to another branch be performed. Once the request is created the code review lifecycle begins and peers begin evaluation and critique of the authors contribution.

Benchmarks - Key metric comparisons between organizations in the area of peer code review practices.

Issue - In software terms this refers to one or more lines of code found to be containing either a defect or opportunity for improvement. In PullRequest we further limit this to lines of code that are both found to contain a defect, by reviewers leaving inline comments, and the code author has made subsequent change to that line. This implies that the author agrees that a problem exists and that it warranted a immediate correction.

Scope, Out-of-Scope - When a pull request(merge request) is opened, the author normally supplies it with a description or links to an associated issue tracking software. This is taken to imply the scope of the change. Additionally only lines of code that are modified by the author in the request are normally considered within scope. Scope is important in defining what types of review comments are given and should be considered actionable.

Code Review Lifecycle - A more generic term referring to the full process of peer code review. This refers to the process of submitting for said review, receiving and responding to feedback, creating additional changes to address feedback where required, getting approval from stakeholder in code and finally merging the code.