Style Checking With Scala.Meta

In many companies, code reviews are big parts of the day-to-day life of an engineer. Some can argue that the time spent on someone else’s code is time that some cannot spent on her or his own work. Code reviews usually allow to find two kinds of issues. The first kind consists of high-level design errors compared to the specifications of the program while the second type consists of style problems. In this report, we argue that the search of the later kind of error can be automated, as the set of style issues is usually well defined for a programming language. We propose modifications to a linter tool called Obey, which allows to analyze Abstract Syntax Trees of Scala code, raise warnings and suggest changes that can be automatically persisted. Over the course of this project we worked jointly with Codacy, a company proposing automated code reviews, to have an industrial application which would allow users to define their own set of rules. This report also presents the results of this real life testing.