A Flexible Code Review Framework for Combining Defect Detection and Review Comments

Abstract

Defects and errors in code are different in that they are not detected by editors or compilers but pose a potential risk to software operation. For safety-critical software such as airborne software, the code review process is necessary to ensure the proper operation of software applications and even an aircraft. The traditional manual review method can no longer meet the current needs with the dramatic increase in code sizes and variety. To this end, we propose Deep Reviewer, a general and flexible code review framework that automatically detects code defects and correlates the review comments of the defects. The framework first preprocesses the data using several methods, including the proposed D2U flow. Then, features are extracted and matched by the detector, which contains a pair of twin LSTM models, one for code defect type detection and the other for review comment retrieval. Finally, the review comment output function is implemented based on the masks generated by the code defect types. The method is validated using a large public dataset, SARD. For the binary-classification task, the test results of the proposed are 98.68% and 98.67% in terms of precision and F1 score, respectively. For the multi-classification task, the proposed framework shows a significant advantage over other methods.