Learning to Boost the Efficiency of Modern Code Review

Abstract: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a standard in all kinds of organizations that develop software. MCR pays for itself through perceived and proven benefits in quality assurance and knowledge transfer. However, the time invest in MCR is generally substantial. The goal of this thesis is to boost the efficiency of MCR by developing AI techniques that can partially replace or assist human reviewers. The envisioned techniques distinguish from existing MCR-related AI models in that we interpret these challenges as graph-learning problems. This should allow us to use state-of-science algorithms from that domain to learn coding and reviewing standards directly from existing projects. The required training data will be mined from online repositories and the experiments will be designed to use standard, quantitative evaluation metrics. This research proposal defines the motivation, research-questions, and solution components for the thesis, and gives an overview of the relevant related work.