Fix-it: An extensible code auto-fix component in Review Bot

Abstract

Coding standard violations, defect patterns and non-conformance to best practices are abundant in checked-in source code. This often leads to unmaintainable code and potential bugs in later stages of software life cycle. It is important to detect and correct these issues early in the development cycle, when it is less expensive to fix. Even though static analysis techniques such as tool-assisted code review are effective in addressing this problem, there is significant amount of human effort involved in identifying the source code issues and fixing it. Review Bot is a tool designed to reduce the human effort and improve the quality in code reviews by generating automatic reviews using static analysis output. In this paper, we propose an extension to Review Bot- addition of a component called Fix-it for the auto-correction of various source code issues using Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) transformations. Fix-it uses built-in fixes to automatically fix various issues reported by the auto-reviewer component in Review Bot, thereby reducing the human effort to greater extent. Fix-it is designed to be highly extensible-users can add support for the detection of new defect patterns using XPath or XQuery and provide fixes for it based on AST transformations written in a high-level programming language. It allows the user to treat the AST as a DOM tree and run XQuery UPDATE expressions to perform AST transformations as part of a fix. Fix-it also includes a designer application which enables Review Bot administrators to design new defect patterns and fixes. The developer feedback on a stand-alone prototype indicates the possibility of significant human effort reduction in code reviews using Fix-it.