A reflective practice of automated and manual code reviews for a studio project

In this paper, the target of code review is project management system (PMS), developed by a studio project in a software engineering master's program, and the focus is on finding defects not only in view of development standards, i.e., design rule and naming rule, but also in view of quality attributes of PMS, i.e., performance and security. From the review results, a few lessons are learned. First, defects which had not been found in the test stage of PMS development could be detected in this code review. These are hidden defects that affect system quality and that are difficult to find in the test. If the defects found in this code review had been fixed before the test stage of PMS development, productivity and quality enhancement of the project would have been improved. Second, manual review takes much longer than an automated one. In this code review, general check items were checked by automation tool, while project-specific ones were checked by manual method. If project-specific check items could also be checked by automation tool, code review and verification work after fixing the defects would be conducted very efficiently. Reflecting on this idea, an evolution model of code review is studied, which eventually seeks fully automated review as an optimized code review.