We’ve been talking a lot about improving our code at work and code reviews have come up several times, and we’ve even had a few informal code review but they always seem a bit tedious. I dug around a bit looking at online tools too help and discovered Review Board:

Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.

What I liked about Review Board was it’s integration with version control (in our case SVN, but many others are supported) which allows for reviews of small bits of code, pre-commit.

The work flow goes something like:

1. Make a change to your local source tree.
2. Create a review request for your new change.
3. Publish the review request and wait for your reviewers to see it.
4. Wait for feedback from the reviewers.
5. If the reviewers approve of your changes:
   1. Submit your change to the repository.
   2. Close the review request.
6. If the reviewers have requested changes:
   1. Update the code in your tree and generate a new diff.
   2. Upload the new diff, specify the changes in the Change Description box, and publish.
7. Rinse and repeat the review cycle.

So pull up a chair, get comfortable and lets install Review Board…

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