Striffs: Architectural Component Diagrams for Code Reviews

Despite recent advancements in automated code quality and defect finding tools, developers spend a significant amount of time completing code reviews. Code understandability is a key contributor to this phenomenon, since engineers need to understand both microscopic and macroscopic level details of the code under review. Existing tools for code reviews including diffing, inline commenting and syntax highlighting provide limited support for the macroscopic understanding needs of reviewers. When reviewing code for architectural and design quality, such tools do not enable reviewers to understand the code from a top-down lens which the original architects of the code would have likely used to design the system. To overcome these limitations and to complement existing approaches, we introduce structure diff (striff) diagrams. Striffs provide reviewers with an architectural understanding of the incoming code in relation to the existing system, allowing reviewers to gain a more complete view of the scope and impact of the proposed code changes in a code review.