Model-based Automated Code Review

Code review is one of the key ways to ensure the quality of code in the software development and it has been widely used in industry since it was proposed.Nowadays code review is still mainly done by manual work in industry. But with the increasing scale of the software project, the manual review can not meet the demand. So it has become one of the most urgent problems for software engineers and researchers to achieve automated code review. Nowadays UML has become the modeling standard in industry and it has been widely used in projects, so this paper studies on how to achieve automated code review based on the UML models which are generated in the design phase of the software development.The paper includes the following contents:Firstly, we propose an automated code review method based on UML models. The main idea of this method is that we use XML files to parse and store the information of UML models. Then we use abstract syntax tree to analyse the source code and translate source code into intermediate representation. We review them with the reviewing check list and get the assessment at last.Secondly, here we implement an automated code review tool called AutomatedReview based on the method above.It can review Java source code based on Class Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams. Thirdly, AutomatedReview shows high accuracy and improves the efficiency of the review in a large number of experimental tests.It proves that our method is reliable and feasible.The research results of this paper apply to the model-driven development project which uses UML models at the design phase.