On the need for a new generation of code review tools

Abstract

Tool support for change-based code review is gaining widespread acceptance in the industry. This indicates that the current generation of tools is well-aligned to current code review practices. Nevertheless, we believe that further improvements in code review tooling can lead to increased review efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we combine results from a qualitative study and results from the literature to substantiate this claim. We derive promising improvement areas and provide an overview of existing research in these areas. A common attribute of these improvements is that they trade flexibility for reviewer support. As flexibility is one of the main characteristics of the current generation of code review tools in Hedberg’s classification of review tool generations, we regard these coming tools as part of a new generation of code review tools.