Code review is effective and widely used, yet still time-consuming. Especially, in large-scale software systems, developers may forget to change other related functions that must be changed together (aka. co-changes). This may increase the number of review iterations and reviewing time, thus delaying the code review process. Based on our analysis of 66 projects from five open-source systems, we find that there are 16%–33% of code reviews where at least one function must be co-changed, but was not initially changed. This study aims to propose an approach to recommend co-changed functions in the context of modern code review, which could reduce reviewing time and iterations and help developers identify functions that need to be changed together. We propose CoChangeFinder, a novel method that employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to recommend co-changed functions for newly submitted code changes. Then, we conduct a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of CoChangeFinder with 66 studied large-scale open-source software projects. Our evaluation results show that our CoChangeFinder outperforms the state-of-the-art approach, achieving 3.44% to 40.45% for top-k accuracy, 2.00% to 26.07% for Recall@k, and 0.04 to 0.21 for mean average precision better than the baseline approach. In addition, our CoChangeFinder demonstrates the capacity to pinpoint the functions related to logic changes. Our CoChangeFinder outperforms the baseline approach (i.e., TARMAQ) in recommending co-changed functions during the code review process. Based on our findings, CoChangeFinder could help developers save their time and effort, reduce review iterations, and enhance the efficiency of the code review process.

Code review is an effective quality assurance practice, but can be labor-intensive since developers have to manually review the code and provide written feedback. Recently, a Deep Learning (DL)-based approach was introduced to automatically recommend code review comments based on changed methods. While the approach showed promising results, it requires expensive computational resource and time which limits its use in practice. To address this limitation, we propose CommentFinder – a retrieval-based approach to recommend code review comments. Through an empirical evaluation of 151,019 changed methods, we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of CommentFinder against the state-of-the-art approach. We find that when recommending the best-1 review comment candidate, our CommentFinder is 32% better than prior work in recommending the correct code review comment. In addition, CommentFinder is 49 times faster than the prior work. These findings highlight that our CommentFinder could help reviewers to reduce the manual efforts by recommending code review comments, while requiring less computational time.

Code review is an effective quality assurance practice, yet can be time-consuming since reviewers have to carefully review all new added lines in a patch. Our analysis shows that at the median, patch authors often waited 15–64 hours to receive initial feedback from reviewers, which accounts for 16%-26% of the whole review time of a patch. Importantly, we also found that large patches tend to receive initial feedback from reviewers slower than smaller patches. Hence, it would be beneficial to reviewers to reduce their effort with an approach to pinpoint the lines that they should pay attention to. In this paper, we proposed REVSPOT-a machine learning-based approach to predict problematic lines (i.e., lines that will receive a comment and lines that will be revised). Through a case study of three open-source projects (i.e., Openstack Nova, Openstack Ironic, and Qt Base), Revspot can accurately predict lines that will receive comments and will be revised (with a Top-10 Accuracy of 81% and 93%, which is 56% and 15% better than the baseline approach), and these correctly predicted problematic lines are related to logic defects, which could impact the functionality of the system. Based on these findings, our Revspot could help reviewers to reduce their reviewing effort by reviewing a smaller set of lines and increasing code review speed and reviewers' productivity.