Recommending Code Reviews Leveraging Code Changes with Structured Information Retrieval

Review comments are one of the main building blocks of modern code reviews. Manually writing code review comments could be time-consuming and technically challenging. Recently, an information retrieval (IR) based approach has been proposed to automatically recommend relevant code review comments for method-level code changes. However, this technique overlooks the structured items (e.g., class name, library information) from the source code and is applicable only for method-level changes. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for relevant review comments recommendation – RevCom – that leverages various code-level changes using structured information retrieval. RevCom uses different structured items from source code and can recommend relevant reviews for all types of changes (e.g., method-level and non-method-level). Our evaluation using three performance metrics show that RevCom outperforms both IR-based and DL-based baselines by up to 49.45% and 23.57% margins in BLEU score in recommending review comments. We find that RevCom can recommend review comments with an average BLEU score of ≈ 26.63%. According to Google’s AutoML Translation documentation, such a BLEU score indicates that the review comments can capture the original intent of the reviewers. All these findings suggest that RevCom can recommend relevant code reviews and has the potential to reduce the cognitive effort of human code reviewers.