Code Kaiser, a headless code review tool for GitHub

Intro

Welcome to Code Kaiser, the no-nonsense headless code review tool for GitHub.

Features

Pull Requests:

• Comment !block to stop a PR from being merged
  • !blocks can time out if not re-addressed (configurable)
• Comment !good to sign off on a PR, or undo your previous block
• A configurable number of !goods are needed for the Code Kaiser PR check to pass
  • E.g. require three unique teammates to sign off on a PR before merge

Code Hotspots:

• Each merged pull request updates a model of "hot" files
• Hot file model plugs into a pie chart generator showing which files have been most actively worked on recent PRs
• 

Examples

Blocking a PR

Allowing a PR

Setup

1. Install dependencies: sudo make install-dependencies (non-RedHat distros need to switch from DNF to CPAN, see Makefile)
2. Setup your repo in data/<repo-owner-username>/<repo-name>/repo.config
   • Make a GitHub user access token if you haven't already
   • See data/victorkp/code-kaiser/repo.config example
3. Setup a GitHub webhook for your repo, so that your Code Kaiser instance recieves events from GitHub:
   • If you have a public IP, great! CodeKaiser defaults to port 8080
   • Otherwise, you can use ngrok. Install ngrok, and run make ngrok to start it, then use your ngrok forwarding URL:
   • 
4. Create a pull request! This finishes setup of CodeKaiser and allows you to complete the next step
5. Setup GitHub protected branches, to force CodeKaiser checks to succeed before allowing a merge
   • 
6. You can monitor your hotspot files in data/<repo-owner>/<repo-name>/output/, which contains small and large .png outputs, as well as an html snippet and a CSV

Future Work

Short term:

• Automated end to end testing
• More robust !block timeouts (check on a timer)
• More unit testing

Long term goal: static code analysis (perhaps with a convolutional neural net)

Bad Code Detection Goals

• Code is unreadable (maybe not enough comments?)
• Subroutine is very long
• Subroutine has duplicate structure to another
• Presence of TODO
• Exceptions caught but not acted upon
• Dangerous use of reflection (Java)
• Confusing/non-distinct naming
• Not checking for null arguments (unless @NonNull)
• Thread doesn't handle interruption (InterruptedException or Thread.interrupted())
• Bad use of data structure
  • Searching through List
  • Iterating through Map