The Review Activity sensor data type is designed to represent the actions taken by a reviewer while performing code review using some sort of automated review tool.
The Review Activity SDT differs from the "basic" Activity SDT primarily in terms of the interpretation of the activities. During review, for example, it is expected that most of the time of the developer is spent reading the review artifacts, with relatively minor time spent actually editing the file. Therefore, the definition of "Active Time" is not as useful in a review environment. Instead, we define a new kind of measure called "Review Active Time" that is based upon a variety of low-level reviewer actions that indicate active time spent in review.
Table 25.17, “ReviewActivity SDT attributes” documents its attributes.
Table 25.17. ReviewActivity SDT attributes
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| tstamp | The UTC time at which this data was collected. |
| tool | A string indicating the tool that collected this data, such as "Eclipse". |
| reviewId | The unique review ID associated with this entry. |
| phase | The phase of review when this activity took place, such as "individual", "team", or "rework". |
| file | The file associated with this review activity, if any. |
In addition to the above required fields for all ReviewActivity data, there are a number of "optional but common" attributes that can appear on the property map. These are documented in Table 25.18, “ReviewActivity SDT "optional but common" properties” so that review tool sensor writers can produce ReviewActivity sensor data that can be processed by the built-in Review analyses and reduction functions.
Table 25.18. ReviewActivity SDT "optional but common" properties
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| author | Provide authorship information from the review tool. Normally this data is overridden by the sensor.properties file representation of the 'user'. |
| module | The review tool's indication of the module under review. Normally this data is overridden by the required file specification. |
| phaseItems | A '#' delimited list of the possible phases associated with this review process. |
| categoryItems | The '#' delimited list of the possible issue types associated with this review process. |
Finally, it is important to note that this SDT was evolved in March, 2006. Thus, there may exist data prior to that time (or subsequent to that time, if the sensors were not updated) that is stored on disk in a different format. However, the evolutionary mechanism will upgrade the old data to this format when reading it in from disk.