Understanding and Improving Code Review of Changes in Build Systems

Build systems orchestrate the transformation of software sources into deliverable artifacts. As a component of the ever-changing software system, they must be maintained alongside the software they build to ensure their consistency with the sources. Lax maintenance of build systems can lead to their quality decay, causing costly consequences. However, maintaining build systems is known to be challenging. Ensuring the quality of build systems throughout their lifespan demands rigorous quality assurance practices. As automated quality assurance methods, such as testing, are rarely applied to build systems, code review becomes a critical mechanism for safeguarding the reliability and correctness of build systems. This thesis investigates the practices used in reviewing changes to build systems and the challenges that impede their effective code reviews (i). It introduces Build Change Impact Analysis (BCIA) as a method to facilitate code review of build systems and examines the applicability of this approach (ii). Lastly, it evaluates the effectiveness of using BCIA to improve the review process of build system changes (iii).