Code review is essential.

15Aug08

Code review is a vital mechanism for ensuring conventions and patterns, as well as spreading knowledge of solutions and technologies throughout a team.

We have been evaluating Crucible as a formal tool for tracking comments and laying the comments alongside the actual code. The cool thing is that it integrates (somewhat) with Fisheye, Jira, and Subversion – all tools that we use. However, it comes with a steep price tag, and its baked-in process is too heavyweight for our small Scrum teams.

So I recently went on a search for an alternative.

In short order, I came across rietveld, which has come out of Guido van Rossum’s 20% Google project (originally Mondrian). This app is built on Google App Engine and integrates with Subversion (along with Perforce from the original Mondrian days).

We’ll try it out and see how it goes.

The best side-effect: in rietveld, we have Guido showing us the best practices in building a Django app on App Engine! Best practice information in this space is hard to come by.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  3 Comments
Tags: ,

3 Responses to “Code review is essential.”  

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address
  1. 1 cranley on August 16, 2008 said:

    I absolutely love code reviews. I love how it gives me the opportunity to actually sit and read other people’s code and share my knowledge and insight. I’ve been able to teach the team a whole lot about Unit Testing, and it’s allowed me to really encourage some best practices.

    I’m very interested in trying this. I’ve found some of the features of Crucible to be really cool (specifically the inline commenting), however I find the process too detached from the rest of our work process, and I find the UI of Crubicle to be confusing and clumsy.

    I look forward to trying out rietveld.

    Reply
  2. 2 sits on August 17, 2008 said:

    Another open-source tool you can use is Codestriker – http://codestriker.sf.net which has been around for ages. Disclaimer – I am one of the authors. It has support for Subversion and other major SCMs, as well as some bug-tracking systems. I haven’t put in support for JIRA yet, but that could be added in without too much pain.

    Reply
  3. 3 Darren on August 20, 2008 said:

    Here’s another one: http://www.review-board.org/ Sign up for the demo, the screenshots, etc, don’t do it justice!

    Reply

Leave a Reply