Salient-class location: help developers understand code change in code review

Abstract

Code review involves a significant amount of human effort to understand the code change, because the information required to inspect code changes may distribute across multiple files that reviewers are not familiar with. Code changes are often organized as commits for review. In this paper, we found that most of the commits contain a salient class, which is saliently modified and causes the modification of the rest classes in a commit. Our user studies confirmed that identifying the salient class in a commit can facilitate reviewers in understanding code change. We model the salient class identification as a binary classification problem and extract a number of discriminative features from commit to characterize the salience of a class. The initial experiment result shows that the proposed approach can improve the efficiency of reviewers understanding code changes in code review.