Towards Automating Code Review Activities

TL;DR

This paper explores automating parts of the code review process using deep learning, aiming to reduce manual effort by suggesting code improvements and implementing reviewer comments.

Contribution

It introduces two deep learning models: one for suggesting code revisions before review and another for automatically applying reviewer comments in natural language.

Findings

Contributor model replicates review transformations in 16% of cases.

Reviewer comment implementation model achieves 31% accuracy.

Results indicate potential but require further development.

Abstract

Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual activity it comes at the cost of spending developers' time on reviewing their teammates' code. Our goal is to make the first step towards partially automating the code review process, thus, possibly reducing the manual costs associated with it. We focus on both the contributor and the reviewer sides of the process, by training two different Deep Learning architectures. The first one learns code changes performed by developers during real code review activities, thus providing the contributor with a revised version of her code implementing code transformations usually recommended during code review before the code is even submitted for review. The second one automatically provides the reviewer commenting on a submitted code with the revised code implementing her comments expressed in natural language. The empirical evaluation of the two models shows that, on the contributor side, the trained model succeeds in replicating the code transformations applied during code reviews in up to 16% of cases. On the reviewer side, the model can correctly implement a comment provided in natural language in up to 31% of cases. While these results are encouraging, more research is needed to make these models usable by developers.