Towards Automated Code Reviews: Does Learning Code Structure Help?

Abstract

Code review is a crucial ingredient to quality software development, but requires a large amount of time and effort for developers. To optimise this manual process, recent research on automated code review seeks to leverage Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models to perform tasks such as automated code improvement. A recent work had pretrained the NMT model for automated code review in order to equip the model with general coding knowledge. However, their pretraining approach is generic to natural languages, which does not leverage the unique properties of coding languages. Therefore, we set out to explore two state-of-the-art pretrained NMT models (i.e., CodeT5 and GraphCodeBERT) that were ..