  Background: Code reviewing is an essential part of software development to
ensure software quality. However, the abundance of review tasks and the
intensity of the workload for reviewers negatively impact the quality of the
reviews. The short review text is often unactionable, which needs further
interaction between the reviewer and the developer. The problem becomes more
critical in dynamic teams and in the case of new team members who are less
familiar with their reviewers and perspectives. Aims: We are proposing the
Example Driven Review Explanation (EDRE) method to facilitate the code review
process by adding additional explanations through examples. EDRE recommends
similar code reviews as examples to further explain a review and help a
developer to understand the received reviews with less communication overhead.
Method: Through an empirical study in an industrial setting and by analyzing
3,722 code reviews across three open-source projects, we compared five methods
of data retrieval, text classification, and text recommendation. Results: EDRE
using TF-IDF word embedding along with an SVM classifier can provide practical
examples for each code review with 92% F-score and 90% Accuracy. Conclusions:
The example-based explanation is an established method for assisting experts in
explaining decisions. EDRE was developed based on the same philosophy and can
accurately provide a set of context-specific examples to facilitate the code
review process in software teams.
