CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w08 cc

Code review tools are used to aid and automate existing code review practices in order to simplify and guide the review work flow. Code review is a critique of one person's written code by another coder to find problems which may have been missed by the original developer <ref> GoogleTalksArchive "Mondrian Code Review on the Web" </ref>.

Code Review Tools

Barkeep

Barkeep is a code review system developed in Ruby by the company Ooyala <ref> GitHub "Comparing barkeep to other code review tools" </ref>. Although written in Ruby Barkeep is not language specific and may be used for code review of any language. Barkeep is standalone and the end user is responsible for hosting it. One of the key features that Barkeep prides itself on is it hackable nature. Since Barkeep is hosted by the user and they provide their “small codebase” it allows users to add on new features and make modifications as they see fit for their needs. So even if Barkeep doesn’t have a feature someone needs it very possible for the user to add it.

Cost: Free

Features

• Email Notifications
• Syntax Highlighted Color Diffs
• Hackable
• Commits Searching
• Review Requests
• Comments
  • Inline Code Snippets
• Stats
  • Most Active Reviewers
  • Most Commented Commits
  • Review Coverage
  • Top Approvers

Collaborator

Collaborator is a code review tool built on CodeCollaborator by SmartBear. Unlike many other code review tools collaborator also doubles as a peer review tool allowing review of not only code but documents and other project deliverables such as user stories, test plans and user documentation. Companies such as Intel, Southwest Airlines, Cisco and Walmart have used Collaborator. <ref> SmartBear "Code & Document Review - Collaborator" </ref>

Cost: Paid

Features

• Real-time Chat
• Syntax Highlighted Color Diffs
• Comments
• IDE & SCM (Source Control Management) Integrations
• Reports
  • Pending Code Reviews
  • Code Review Performance
  • Many more…
• Customizable and Automated Workflows
• Defect Tracking & Management
• Review Checklists

Rietveld

Rietveld is an open source web application for code reviews. Rietveld was inspired by Mondrian a internal web application at Google used for code reviews. Mondrian is heavily used inside Google and a developer of Mondrian always wanted to release it as an open source tool but due to its popularity within the company was unable to. Rietveld came about from the inspiration of Mondrian and was released to the open source Python community.

Cost: Free

Features

• Email Notifications
• Syntax Highlighted Color Diffs
• Hackable
• Inline Comment

Comparison

Functionality

Tool	Maintainer	Developed In	Available For	Cost
jkl	mno	pqr
stu	vwx	yz

Features

"x" denotes a feature.

Tools/Features	Email Notifications	Side-by-side file comparison	Syntax highlighted code diffs	Integration with subversion
Barkeep			*
Rietveld			*
Code Collaborator			x

References

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