Enhanced GitHub code review

Abstract

Code review is a commonly used process to ensure the software quality of a product is maintained at a high level. One of the popular sites at the moment to employ code review is GitHub. GitHub provides a software repository hosting service and also has an integrated code review interface. The current GitHub interface is not suitable for reviewing large pull requests. It does not scale well and offers no dynamic possibilities to highlight important parts of the pull request and suppress changes with minor relevancy. Therefore a tool must be developed to display code changes in a more dynamic and intuitive way. Authors must be provided with a simple yet effective way to explain their changes. As a result the reviewer of the pull request will have an easier process reviewing, understanding and providing feedback on the pull request. Students must first employ research on the state-of-the-art science regarding code review and digest pain-points of the current code review process. Using the obtained knowledge, the tool must be developed which takes into account the available research. This tool must be evaluated with usability tests to ensure the goal of the tool is achieved. Later an experiment must be designed to verify the effectiveness of the improved user interface.