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:
- Make a change to your local source tree.
- Create a review request for your new change.
- Publish the review request and wait for your reviewers to see it.
- Wait for feedback from the reviewers.
- If the reviewers approve of your changes:
- Submit your change to the repository.
- Close the review request.
- If the reviewers have requested changes:
- Update the code in your tree and generate a new diff.
- Upload the new diff, specify the changes in the Change Description box, and publish.
- Rinse and repeat the review cycle.
So pull up a chair, get comfortable and lets install Review Board…
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