Minisymposium Presentation

Software sustainability is critical for Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software. It is also challenging for several reasons, including that CSE software projects often begin as a research activity. Highly complex code makes software more difficult to maintain and less sustainable. Code reviews are a valuable part of the software development lifecycle and can be executed to manage complexity and promote sustainability. However, inadequate code reviews decrease software quality and increase maintenance burden. We developed a technique to guide the code review process that considers cyclomatic complexity levels and changes during code reviews. We then conducted a survey to determine the usefulness of complexity metrics during code reviews and gather feedback. The results indicate that practitioners find the metrics useful and that, over time, utilizing the metrics during pull request code reviews has the potential to improve the maintainability and sustainability of CSE software.