Deep Review Sharing

Review-Based Software Improvement (RBSI for short) has drawn increasing research attentions in recent years. Relevant efforts focus on how to leverage the underlying information within reviews to obtain a better guidance for further updating. However, few efforts consider the Projects Without sufficient Reviews (PWR for short). Actually, PWR dominates the software projects, and the lack of PWR-based RBSI research severely blocks the improvement of certain software. In this paper, we make the first attempt to pave the road. Our goal is to establish a generic framework for sharing suitable and informative reviews to arbitrary PWR. To achieve this goal, we exploit techniques of code clone detection and review ranking. In order to improve the sharing precision, we introduce Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into our clone detection, and design a novel CNN based clone searching module for our sharing system. Meanwhile, we adopt a heuristic filtering strategy to reduce the sharing time cost. We implement a prototype review sharing system RSharer and collect 72,440 code-review pairs as our ground knowledge. Empirical experiments on hundreds of real code fragments verify the effectiveness of RSharer. RSharer also achieves positive response and evaluation by expert developers.