In today’s world maintaining codebases is considered as a really hectic task, in addition to that tasks like reviewing pull requests, proposing solutions for different kind of issues adds a lot to this. This is where CodeGuard comes into play. Codeguard is an intelligent GitHub bot designed to assist developers by automating routine yet critical tasks. It automates pull request reviews, suggest solutions for various kind of issues and provides assistance when specifically mentioned. It ingests the whole codebase giving it a better understanding of the project and enabling more context aware recommendations.
We plan to build it with modular microservices architecture prioritizing Reliability, Availability, scalability and security to ensure easy adaptation and better performance. It integrates easily with github accounts or organisations and uses natural language processing to understand queries and providing appropriate responses in return. Codeguard is perfect for busy teams who want to automate their tasks while maintaining full control over their repositories.
Name: Atharva Gupta Student number: 48195609
CodeGuard is designed to automated Github repository management tasks which results in reducing the pressure on developers while providing workflow efficiency. It helps in assisting teams by automatically reviewing pull requests, proposing appropriate solutions for any new issues created and providing useful insights with minimal manual intervention.
In case of functionality, developers interact directly with CodeGuard within their Github repositories. The bot responds to specific events, performing relevant tasks automatically or on demand. The general workflow is as follows:
Repository Integration: Teams can easily integrate CodeGuard within their GitHub repositories via OAuth authorization, as soon as it is authorized CodeGuard will be ready to assist and take over tasks.
Pull Request Automation: Whenever a developer creates a new pull request, CodeGuard can automatically performs a review by checking for coding standard compliance(eg. indentation, variable naming), verifying presence of required tests, ensuring commit message follows a defined format and also by checking potential vulnerabilities.
It can also suggest automated code changes or improvements where applicable, allowing developers to apply them directly without rewriting the changes again.
It also leaves a detailed review comments and suggestions directly within the pull requests. And also assigns the appropriate reviewers for pull requests related to their tasks.
Issue Management: After creation of a new issue, CodeGuard analyzes the issue’s title and description. It then proposes a suitable solution or next steps. It also categorizes the issue and applies appropriate tags.
Assistance via mentions: Developers can mention CodeGuard in any pull request, issue or discussion thread with queries such as:
CodeGuard processes the request, understands the context using it’s ingested codebase knowledge and responds appropriately.
Consider a busy project with multiple contributors. A contributor submits a pull request based on fixing a bug. CodeGuard immediately reviews the pull request, checks if the appropriate tests are added, checks code style and ensures commit messages meet specified standards. It also detects minor issues (e.g. inconsistent naming) and automatically suggests code corrections.
Meanwhile, a new issue describing a feature request is created. CodeGuard analyzes the description and suggests a template solution to help the developers get started faster. Later, a developer mentions CodeGuard asking it to create a new issue titled “Add pagination to API responses”. CodeGuard creates the issue with standard formatting.
The scope of CodeGuard for the Minimum Viable Product(MVP) focuses primarily on ability to:
Ingestion of the whole codebase for contextual understanding(eg. RAG).
Automatically reviews pull requests by doing basic rule checks such as code style verification, confirmation of presence of specific test cases and commit message formatting. It also provides suggestions for improvements and posts review comments directly in the pull request.
Automatic tagging of newly created issues based on their title and description along with initial solution suggestions or next steps for common issue types.
Appropriate response to mentions(@CodeGuard) by understanding the semantic meaning of the query.
Ability to make new issues when requested.
Secure integration with GitHub repos using OAuth and scopes limited to necessary permissions (read/write access to PRs and issues)
The most important quality attributes for this project are Availability, Scalability, Reliability and Security. These attributes were chosen carefully as explained below and are ordered with respect to their importance.
It is really important for CodeGuard to be reliable as it will play a important role in building trust among the developers. It is necessary for CodeGuard to consistently deliver accurate reviews, suggest most viable solution and responses without failing or producing inconsistent results.
It is expected from the bot to be responsive whenever demanded. Whether it is reviewing a pull request, tagging issues or providing solutions, downtime or unresponsiveness would make a huge impact in the tool’s usefulness. Availability ensures that CodeGuard is always ready to help without delay.
It is expected from CodeGuard to handle increasing workloads as the repository size increases or as multiple teams utilize the bot. Horizontal scalability play a huge role in ensuring smooth operation without degraded performance while handling multiple repositories and users simultaneously.
As CodeGuard interacts with Github repos and uses access tokens from different accounts, securing it’s operations is non negotiable. Any compromise with this aspect could result in exposing sensitive code repositories or allow unauthorized actions.
In evaluation we will focus on ensuring that the above attributes are met effectively.
CodeGuard aims to reduce the workload in managing Github repos by automation of key tasks such as PR reviews, issue classification and solutions related to coding tasks. By using microservices architecture and integrating natural language processing, CodeGuard helps in streamlining routine tasks.