Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Looks Good To Me - Source Code Review Tools

By Steve McKay and Jason Robbins, Open Source Team

Code reviews are the rule at Google -- peer review reduces bugs, increases code quality, reduces maintenance cost, opens up team communication, and helps get the job done right the first time.

Like many open source developers, Google engineers used to rely on mail and textual diffs when doing code reviews. That made code reviews a drag. Mondrian, a web based code review tool, made the process much more efficient by presenting the diffs and comments right in our browser. Mondrian inspired the open source project Review Board, and led to Rietveld, and now the new code review tools are available on Google Code's Project Hosting.

Reviewing code in your project is simple: browse any source file or diff, double click on a source line to add comments, then publish your comments along with a general comment and score for the revision.
You can see code reviews in action on the code.google.com support project. So why are you still reading this? Learn how to use code reviews and don't forget to let us know what you think.
at 7/30/2008 08:23:00 PM

10 comments:

  1. Juan Mendes7/31/2008 1:55 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Juan Mendes7/31/2008 1:57 PM

    This doesn't sound so easy... We use perforce for versioning and code collaborator (with a perforce plugin) for code reviews. Code collaborator uploads the files you have checked out and peers can review the changes, add defects, add comments. You can even block submission of code into the depot until a code review has been performed.. I know, you have to pay for both tools...

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  3. Sherif8/01/2008 1:02 AM

    How about Atlassian Crucible - thats the best code review tool Ive seen!

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  4. Huseyn guliyev8/01/2008 3:37 AM

    I love this. but unfortunately it is for open soruce projects only. It would be very nice if google would provide the same service for proprietary closed code.

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  5. Unknown8/01/2008 7:17 AM

    Very nice. Supporting only Subversion on Google Code, however, renders this useless for those many projects that use other version control system.

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  6. kioopi8/01/2008 7:34 AM

    When i double click on a line in Firefox 3/Windows XP no Inpur Field pops up.
    In IE 6 it does though.

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  7. pte8/03/2008 9:52 PM

    Sweet, love how it is always on rather than having to create a review. --- blatant bias, I work for Atlassian on Crucible --- Crucible is free for open source if you want it on your own server. Supports CVS, Svn, P4 and in the not too distant future Git & Hg.

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  8. Unknown8/10/2008 5:53 AM

    Steve, Jason - this is excellent news!

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  9. AumJa248/12/2008 7:34 AM

    i love this.

    very nice.

    ReplyDelete
  10. hfrmobile8/27/2008 6:32 AM

    The video contains some nice ideas how doing code reviews.

    thx, hfr

    ReplyDelete

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