Code review is a systematic inspection of the codebase.
It ensures that the software satisfies the required functionalities
and standards; thus, it is an essential stage in the modern
development process and is used frequently in the industry. For a
successful review, the reviewer should be able to identify defects;
therefore, the process is highly dependent on the awareness of
the reviewer. Currently, code review is done by comparing the
line-by-line differences on the codebase. However, this does not
give structural information, such as design pattern changes or
dependency changes between services.
To address this problem, we propose an augmented nextgeneration
code review experience using visual and holistic
approaches to streamline the reviewing process. The proposed
code review experience shows the structural representation of the
change by visualizing it into a UML-like relationship diagram.
Along with this diagram, the risk percentage for each commit
is highlighted to emphasize the differences that possibly can be
most affected by the change. An artifact map is also produced
that includes issue-commit relation for bug tracking, to make
reviewers aware of the frequent issues that are brought up. This
map also highlights the change frequency of the files, for focusing
the reviewers on the possibly vulnerable parts of the software for
better quality reviews. The proposed visualizations have been
implemented in a plugin-based proof-of-concept tool integrated
within GitHub, supporting the visual reviewing of changes in
codebases developed with Java language.

Augmenting Code Review Experience Through Visualization

The ninth IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021) builds upon the success of the previous eight editions of VISSOFT, which in turn followed after six editions of the IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT) and five editions of the ACM Sympo0sium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS). In 2021, VISSOFT will take place and be co-located with ICSME.

IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021)