Automated code reviews on Bitbucket repositories and other enhancements in Amazon CodeGuru

This post covers the support for the Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud source repository for Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, which was recently announced. It also delves into new functionalities introduced to enhance the developer experience in CodeGuru Reviewer.

CodeGuru Reviewer is a machine learning-based service that scans your pull requests and gives you recommendations against your source code in Bitbucket with a description of what’s causing the issue and how to remediate it. CodeGuru Reviewer identifies code quality issues in five broad categories:

• AWS best practices
• Concurrency
• Resource leaks
• Sensitive information leaks
• Common code bugs

You can also use CodeGuru Reviewer to provide code quality or AWS best practice recommendations when you migrate your code base to Java or adopt AWS services to achieve scale and robustness. The CodeGuru Reviewer recommendations offer unique capabilities in static code analysis, including the following:

• Lower false positives
• Difficult-to-identify issues like resource leaks and concurrency
• Machine learning to evolve continuously from Amazon code bases
• AWS best practices

In short, Amazon CodeGuru (Preview) equips your development team with the tools to maintain a high bar of coding standards in the software development process.

In this blog, we will go over the following items:

1. Using the Getting Started wizard.
2. Associating the Bitbucket repository with the CodeGuru Reviewer and generating a pull request to trigger an automated code review.
3. Using the new pull request code reviews dashboard to keep track of the history of pull requests and associated CodeGuru Reviewer recommendations
4. Using supported APIs and AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to carry out CodeGuru Reviewer functions.

Using the Getting Started wizard

If you’re new to CodeGuru (Preview), you should follow the wizard guidance from the Getting started drop-down menu on the CodeGuru (Preview) console. This has been recently introduced to facilitate configuring the service.

Choose CodeGuru Profiler or CodeGuru Reviewer for configuration and follow the guided steps.

Associating a Bitbucket repository

This section summarizes the high level steps to associate the Bitbucket code repository with CodeGuru Reviewer. For more information, see What is Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer?

1.  On the CodeGuru (Preview) console, choose Reviewer.

2.  Choose Associated repositories.

3.  Choose Associate repository.

4.  Select Bitbucket.

5.  For Connect to Bitbucket, you can choose an existing connection from the drop-down menu or choose Create a Bitbucket connection.

6.  After choosing Create a Bitbucket connection, for Connection name, provide a name for your connection; for example, Bitbucket-Connection.

7.  Choose Connect to Bitbucket Cloud.

A window opens to log in to Bitbucket.

8.  If you’re not already logged in, enter your Bitbucket login credentials.

9.  In the Bitbucket connection settings section, for Connection name, the name you entered in earlier step will be displayed.

10.  For Bitbucket Cloud apps, you can search for an existing app in the search text box or choose Install a new app.

After you choose Install a new app, a pop-up window appears asking for authorization to grant access for AWS CodeStar.

11.  Choose Grant Access.

You now see a connection string populated in the Bitbucket Cloud apps field.

12.  Choose Connect.

You return to the earlier screen, which provides you with a drop-down menu of repositories from your Bitbucket account.

13.  Choose an appropriate repository and choose Associate.

You can see your repository is in the status Associating as shown below:

When the association is complete, the status shows as Associated. The following screenshot shows two repositories in the Associated state. This indicates that CodeGuru (Preview) is now listening for any pull request notifications from these repositories.

Now you can go to the Bitbucket site and access your repository.

14.  On the Bitbucket website, create a pull request for the Bitbucket repository.

CodeGuru (Preview) is notified of any pull requests created on that repository. This triggers the code review for the code referenced in the pull request. You can see generated recommendations on the Activity tab.

The following screenshot shows recommendations generated on the Bitbucket dashboard. Note that the recommendations are generated inline under the applicable lines of code, similar to a Review comment inserted manually by a user. As highlighted below, the review comment will mention as “Recommendation generated by Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer.” You may utilize the Bitbucket feature of creating a task per review comment and tracking it through a central dashboard for the completion. Example given below.

You can now take further actions to address the comments and merge the code.

Using the pull request code reviews dashboard

AWS introduced this dashboard based on early feedback requesting a centralized place to manage details about code review history. The pull request dashboard allows you to view CodeGuru Reviewer recommendations for all code reviews. This page lists all code reviews with accompanying information such as the status of the code review, the repository, the number of recommendations, and more.

Every code review is assigned a unique ARN that allows you to see the details of an individual code review, including any recommendations that may have surfaced.

The following screenshot shows the details of a code review.

The following are key details:

• Status – Confirms that the code review is complete. This is especially useful in use cases where there are no generated recommendations.
• Metered lines of code – Refers to the lines of code scanned for the code request, excluding the lines without significant code (for example, commented code or lines with only opening or closing braces).
• Pull request Id – Provides a link to navigate back to the code review page on the repository and review the complete code review activity.
• Recommendations – Provides a text search capability to locate specific recommendations

The following screenshot shows an individual recommendation.

You can give feedback on CodeGuru recommendations by choosing either the thumbs up or thumbs down icon below each recommendation. This gives you the opportunity to provide input about whether the recommendation was useful for you. These inputs enable AWS to evolve the service with more relevant recommendations.

Using the supported APIs and AWS CLI

The pull request code review dashboard includes the following APIs:

• DescribeCodeReview
• ListCodeReviews
• ListRecommendations
• PutRecommendationFeedback
• DescribeRecommendationFeedback
• ListRecommendationFeedback

In addition, you can use equivalent AWS CLI commands. To use the AWS CLI, you need to install the AWS CLI version 2. For more information about CodeGuru Reviewer operations, see codeguru-reviewer. For more information about CodeGuru Profiler operations, see codeguruprofiler.

The following are a few examples exercising the above API’s using aws cli’s:

Admin:~/environment $ aws codeguru-reviewer list-repository-associations
{
{
    "RepositoryAssociationSummaries": [
        {
            "AssociationArn": "arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Region>:<AcctID>:association:11c1b6a3-638f-4a6c-bfc8-3e286785632a",
            "LastUpdatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T04:46:16.742000+00:00",
            "AssociationId": "11c1b6a3-638f-4a6c-bfc8-3e286785632a",
            "Name": "codeguruapp",
            "Owner": "nvaidya1",
            "ProviderType": "Bitbucket",
            "State": "Associated"
        },
        {
            "AssociationArn": "arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Region>:<AcctID>:association:29ec5f42-34b4-448e-909e-76fc98bd8e59",
            "LastUpdatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T03:13:55.878000+00:00",
            "AssociationId": "29ec5f42-34b4-448e-909e-76fc98bd8e59",
            "Name": "MyJavaProject",
            "Owner": "nvaidya1",
            "ProviderType": "Bitbucket",
            "State": "Associated"
        }
    ]
}

Admin:~/environment $ aws codeguru-reviewer list-code-reviews --type PullRequest
{
    "CodeReviewSummaries": [
        {
            "Name": "BITBUCKET-codeguruapp-2-3099f39ad26a2d70e93d0288dfbd8ae301e925d5",
            "CodeReviewArn": "arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Region>:<AcctID>:code-review:PullRequest-BITBUCKET-codeguruapp-2-3099f39ad26a2d70e93d0288dfbd8ae301e925d5",
            "RepositoryName": "codeguruapp",
            "Owner": "<Snip>",
            "ProviderType": "Bitbucket",
            "State": "Completed",
            "CreatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T04:47:43.868000+00:00",
            "LastUpdatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T04:51:47.492000+00:00",
            "Type": "PullRequest",
            "PullRequestId": "2",
            "MetricsSummary": {
                "MeteredLinesOfCodeCount": 74,
                "FindingsCount": 5
            }
        }
    ]
} 
<SNIP>

Admin:~/environment $ aws codeguru-reviewer list-recommendations --code-review-arn arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Remaining-ARN-String>
{
    "RecommendationSummaries": [
        {
            "FilePath": "src/main/java/com/company/sample/application/EventHandler.java",
            "RecommendationId": "573efe3796b8b96f455591aa6eb4b675f77c95b9cf42f5a260ecc0dee0299e53",
            "StartLine": 170,
            "EndLine": 170,
            "Description": "This code is written so that the client cannot be reused across invocations of the Lambda function.\nTo improve the performance of the Lambda function, consider using static initialization/constructor, global/static variables and singletons. It allows to keep alive and reuse HTTP connections that were established during a previous invocation.\nLearn more about [best practices for working with AWS Lambda functions](https://docs.thinkwithwp.com/lambda/latest/dg/best-practices.html)."
        },
<SNIP>

Admin:~/environment $ aws codeguru-reviewer describe-code-review --code-review-arn arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Remaining-ARN-String>
{
    "CodeReview": {
        "Name": "BITBUCKET-codeguruapp-2-3099f39ad26a2d70e93d0288dfbd8ae301e925d5",
        "CodeReviewArn": "arn:aws:codeguru-reviewer:<Region>:<AcctID>:code-review:PullRequest-BITBUCKET-codeguruapp-2-3099f39ad26a2d70e93d0288dfbd8ae301e925d5",
        "RepositoryName": "codeguruapp",
        "Owner": "<snip>",
        "ProviderType": "Bitbucket",
        "State": "Completed",
        "StateReason": "CodeGuru Reviewer successfully finished reviewing the pull request source code.",
        "CreatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T04:47:43.868000+00:00",
        "LastUpdatedTimeStamp": "2020-05-06T04:51:47.492000+00:00",
        "Type": "PullRequest",
        "PullRequestId": "2",
        "SourceCodeType": {
            "CommitDiff": {
                "SourceCommit": "3099f39ad26a2d70e93d0288dfbd8ae301e925d5",
                "DestinationCommit": "7338cd2fd99e6e663b3a312e80e5ca2b570a6891"
            }
        },
        "Metrics": {
            "MeteredLinesOfCodeCount": 74,
            "FindingsCount": 5
        }
    }
}

Cleaning up

When you’re finished testing, you should un-provision the service to avoid incurring further charges:

• CodeGuru Reviewer – Remove the association of CodeGuru (Preview) to the repository, so that any further pull request notifications doesn’t trigger CodeGuru (Preview) to perform an automated code review.
• CodeGuru Profiler – If configured, remove the profiling group.

Conclusion

This post reviewed CodeGuru (Preview) support for Bitbucket repositories for CodeGuru Reviewer. It also reviewed the pull request dashboard and supported APIs and AWS CLI functionalities. You can take advantage of these features to enhance your application development workflow.