B. Insights from the Interviews
Prior literature has found that the primary goal of code reviews is most often to improve the quality of software by identifying defects, identify better approaches for a source code change or help to improve the maintainability of code [16]. There are, however, other secondary benefits of code reviews such as knowledge dissemination, and team awareness [6]. We found similar sentiments at Microsoft, as developers at Microsoft consider a code review effective if the review comments help to improve the quality of code. On the other hand, comments whose sole purpose can be attributed to knowledge dissemination and team awareness are perceived as less useful by developers.