Working with continuous integration is an exciting new filed. You get your code into the main branch directly. Well, that’s what the theory says. What you really get is feedback directly, at least the feedback from the automated checks for technical debt, testing and similar.
What you do not get quickly is the review of your code by your colleagues. In larger organizations, things like code reviews do not get prioritized. Therefore they tend to slow down software development rather than speed up!
In this paper, we set of to understand how to fix that. We used Gerrit as the tool to extract lines of code to review, instead of reviewing all of the lines. Here is a short video about this: https://play.gu.se/media/t/0_h7hx95d2
The abstract of the paper is included:
Code reviews are one of the first quality assurance tasks in continuous software integration and delivery. The goal of our work is to reduce the need for manual reviews by automatically identify which code fragments should be further reviewed manually. We conducted an action research study with two companies where we extracted code reviews and build machine learning classifiers (AdaBoost and Convolutional Neural Network — CNN). Our results show that the accuracy of recognizing code fragments that require manual review, measured with Matthews Correlation Coefficient, was 0.70 in the combination of our own feature extraction and CNN. We conclude that this way of combining automation with manual code reviews can improve the speed of reviews while providing organizations with the possibility to support knowledge transfer among the designers.
