CFar: A Tool to Increase Communication, Productivity, and Review Quality in Collaborative Code Review

Collaborative code review has become an integral part of the collaborative design process in the domain of software development. However, there are well-documented challenges and limitations to collaborative code review---for instance, high-quality code reviews may require significant time and effort for the programmers, whereas faster, lower-quality reviews may miss code defects. To address these challenges, we introduce CFar, a novel tool design for extending collaborative code review systems with an automated code reviewer whose feedback is based on program-analysis technologies. To validate this design, we implemented CFar as a production-quality tool and conducted a mixed-method empirical evaluation of the tool usage at Microsoft. Through the field deployment of our tool and a laboratory study of professional programmers using the tool, we produced several key findings showing that CFar enhances communication, productivity, and review quality in human--human collaborative code review.