ReviewRanker: A Semi-supervised Learning-Based Approach for Code Review Quality Estimation

Code review is considered a key process in the software industry for minimizing bugs and improving code quality. Inspection of review process effectiveness and continuous improvement can boost development productivity. Such inspection is a time-consuming and human-bias-prone task. We propose a semi-supervised learning-based system ReviewRanker which is aimed at assigning each code review a confidence score which is expected to resonate with the quality of the review. Our proposed method is trained based on simple and well-defined labels provided by developers. The labeling task requires little to no effort from the developers and has an indirect relation to the end goal (assignment of review confidence score). ReviewRanker is expected to improve industry-wide code review quality inspection by reducing human bias and the effort required for such a task. The system has the potential of minimizing the back-and-forth cycle existing in the development and review process. Usable code and dataset for this research can be found at: https://github.com/saifarnab/code_review .