(14) What are the best code review tools? - Quora

(14) What are the best code review tools? - Quora

This is a bit longer answer to the question - tool recommendations are in the end.

First some background. I've written Master's thesis about conducting efficient code reviews in small software companies, which was partly based on a case study which I made with our own projects in small (10 employees) software company producing apps for Mac and iOS.

During the last 6-7 years I've evaluated various code review tools, including:

• Atlassian Crucible (SVN, CVS and Perforce)
• Google Gerrit (for Git)
• Facebook Phabricator Differential (Git, Hg, SVN)
• SmartBear Code Collaborator (supports pretty much anything)
• Bitbucket code comments
• Github code comments

At some point I've also just manually reviewed patches which were e-mailed after each commit/push.

I've tried many variations of the code review process:

• pre-commit vs. post-commit
• collecting various metrics & continuously trying to optimize the process vs. keeping it as simple as possible
• making code review required for every line vs. letting developers to decide what to review
• using checklists vs. relying on developers' experience-based intuition

Based on my experience with the code review process itself and the tools mentioned above, within the context of a small software company, I would make the following three points about code reviews:

1. Code reviews are very useful and should be conducted even in software which may not be very "mission critical". The list of benefits is too long to discuss here in detail, but short version: supplementing testing/QA by ensuring quality and reducing rework, sharing knowledge about code, architecture and best practices, ensuring consistency, increasing "bus count". It's well worth the price of 10-20% of each developer's time.
2. Code reviews shouldn't require use of a complex tool (some of which require maintenance by their own) or a time-consuming process. Preferably, no external tool at all.
3. Code reviews should be natural part of development process of each and every feature.

Based on those points, I would recommend the following process & tools:

1. Use Bitbucket or Github for your source control
2. Use hgflow/gitflow (or similar) process for your product development
3. The author creates Pull Request for a feature branch when it's ready for review. The author describes the Pull Request to the reviewer either in PR comments (with prose, diagrams etc) or directly face-to-face.
4. The reviewer reviews the Pull Request in Bitbucket/Github. A discussion can be had as Github/Bitbucket comments on PR level, on code level, face-to-face or combining all of those.
5. When the review is done, feature branch is merged in.
6. Every feature goes through the same process

So, my recommended tools are the same you should be using for your source code control:

• Bitbucket Pull Requests
• Github Pull Requests
• Atlassian Stash Pull Requests (if you need to keep the code in-house)

Written Oct 11, 2014 • View Upvotes

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