Let's make it fun: Gamifying and formalizing Code review

Code review is a highly important task in the software development lifecycle. However, some of the characteristics of code review hinder practitioners' performance of this task. Code review is considered to be tedious and uninteresting, and includes challenging human aspects, such as collaboration among stakeholders. Despite the many concerns that need to be taken into consideration when performing code review, a comprehensive, formal definition thereof is yet to be determined. In a previous research, a set of formal guidelines for code review was presented, in the context of performing this task in a gamified environment. In this ongoing research, we explore whether the field of software engineering provides a formal definition for code review, and whether a formal definition is needed. The preliminary findings of this research indicate that while the field does provide several definitions for code review, in all that concerns the human aspect of this task, a formal definition is in order. As a response for this need, we present a framework of the task of code review toward its formalization, embedding gamification for motivation enhancement.