  Code review is widely known as one of the best practices for software quality
assurance in software development. In a typical code review process, reviewers
check the code committed by developers to ensure the quality of the code,
during which reviewers and developers would communicate with each other in
review comments to exchange necessary information. As a result, understanding
the information in review comments is a prerequisite for reviewers and
developers to conduct an effective code review. Code snippet, as a special form
of code, can be used to convey necessary information in code reviews. For
example, reviewers can use code snippets to make suggestions or elaborate their
ideas to meet developers' information needs in code reviews. However, little
research has focused on the practices of providing code snippets in code
reviews. To bridge this gap, we conduct a mixed-methods study to mine
information and knowledge related to code snippets in code reviews, which can
help practitioners and researchers get a better understanding about using code
snippets in code review. Specifically, our study includes two phases: mining
code review data and conducting practitioners' survey. The study results
highlight that reviewers can provide code snippets in appropriate scenarios to
meet developers' specific information needs in code reviews, which will
facilitate and accelerate the code review process.
