Online Code Reviews - Codestriker

Part of the development process at work is code reviews. It is a peer review working as a sanity checker, and provides more than one set of eyes looking at the problem. The process itself is fairly simply governed by an excellent source control system in Subversion (with additional excellent tools like TortoiseSVN).

There is an online tool to help with the annotations and code reviews process. It's called Codestriker and provides a web interface and access to the source control through it. Basically the system provides the ability to annotate source code and allow others to read those notes.

It's good for a formalised system, but is a very comprehensive system. This means that it does take a lot more user interface interaction than a simple email detailing any changes. For a large system with many developers it could be more of an invaluable tool, especially for large quantities of comments. It is also useful if your code is really bad and you need lots of comments ;)

The system also has Bugzilla integration, so stick together this, Subversion, and Bugzilla and you have quite a powerful open-source system.

Code Reviews

At work we do code reviews as part of our development process. This means every commit has to have an additional set of eyes go over it and confirm the edits are good and adhere to the coding standards.

This can be an intrusive process, but also can be priceless. The creator of Python Guido van Rossum has developed a code review system whilst working for Google. The system is called Mondrian and there is some more information here on a blog interview. Currently it uses Perforce but in order for it to be released as open-source it will also work for Subversion and different database backends.