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. Therefore, the research community is showing a rising interest in this issue. 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 actually 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.

In this study, we survey developers in two companies - Adnovum, working predominantly on closed-source projects, and in Red Hat open source projects. Based on a set of 154 respondents, we have found that 77% of developers sometimes experience interpersonal conflicts in code review, even though mostly not very frequently. These conflicts pose some degree of a problem to 64% of developers. However, developers are rather successful in deriving constructive outcomes in the face of conflicts - 24% of developers actually report that conflicts have more positive than negative outcomes. While they are highly successful in deriving positive outcomes for code quality and maintainability, the motivation of developers and their communication and collaboration in a team has the most potential to be harmed by conflicts. The most effective strategy to have constructive rather than destructive conflicts is managing work effort and re-assigning tasks in the team to reduce stress in the code review.