A Unified Code Review Automation for Large-scale Industry with Diverse Development Environments

Abstract

Code Review is an essential activity to ensure the quality of the software in the development process. Code Review Automation with various analyses can reduce human efforts of code review activities. However, it is a challenge to automate the code review process for large-scale companies such as Samsung Electronics due to their complex development environments: many kinds of products, various sizes of software, different version control systems, and diverse code review systems. In this work, we show how we automated the code review process for those intricate environments, and share some lessons learned during two years of operation. Our unified code review automation system, Code Review Bot, is designed to process review requests holistically regardless of such environments. Our findings provide practical evidence that our system motivates developers in Samsung Electronics to improve code quality.