Code review is an activity where developers receive feedback on their code contributions from other developers. The frequent and potentially negative feedback developers receive makes code review prone to interpersonal conflicts. There is a consensus about such behavior being anti-social and leading to negative outcomes for the code, team, project, and even the company. However, these conflicts are a naturally occurring phenomenon that can lead to reaping the benefits of code review if managed well. Interpersonal conflicts in code review are not necessarily an issue to avoid, but rather to be managed.
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Gonçalves et al. (2024) studied this question.
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