By now, code review automation is a pretty established practice and more of a norm than a value add. There still exists the debate whether code review automation really brings much value to the table in case of
1. Applications which might not demand a high quality code where every coding standard has been considered or
2. In a case where the tool throws up too many observations which might not be feasible to fix in the already tight delivery schedules.
In spite of all the apprehensions, the code review tools definitely help in a few aspects at least to maintain some hygiene in the code being spewed out. Namely,
1. Maintaining some coding standards and styling, making the code much more readable and maintainable
2. In case of certain Java related tools like Findbugs, which also point out possible null pointer exceptions and performance bottle necks.
3. Extremely useful to get the newbies at a decent standard of coding without much efforts on mentoring, since most tools come with a explanation to fix the reported finding
4. Saves a lot of precious peer review time of detecting empty catch blocks, wrongly declared data types, initializations within loops and the like...
