April 17, 2008 at 11:26PM Review Board isn’t for us
I finally got around to installing Review Board on a machine here at work.
It’s not going to work for us.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent piece of software, but there’s a fundamental difference in the way that things get done at Blacknight and the way Review Board expects things to be done. Specifically, Review Board expects the review to be done pre-commit, whereas the only way a code review happens here is if somebody other than the original developer initiates it.
Now, much as I’d wish people would do pre-commit code reviews, given everybody’s personalities and sundry responsibilities, they’re never going to happen here unless they happen post-commit.
I’ve had a look around, and all the other code review software doesn’t seem to fit too well with the kind of workflow I need to account for. I’m going to keep looking, but it’s becoming increasingly likely that I’m going to have to write something myself. Suckage.
Any suggestions are welcome.
Update (May 6th): Christian Hammond, in whose blog I first stumbled across Review Board mentioned in a comment below the fold that there is indeed a way to do post-commit reviews. I’m going to take a read of it and see how things go.
1 On May 3, 2008 at 10:42, Christian Hammond wrote:
Sorry to hear that Review Board didn’t work out, but thanks for giving it a try!
One thing we don’t advertise nearly enough (and I think we’re going to make it more obvious down the road) is that Review Board isn’t just for pre-commit reviews. If you use the post-review tool (which makes it really easy to create and update review requests) you can easily put up a review request for committed code. We have some new documentation on the wiki (http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/wiki/UsingPostReview) that describes how to do this.
Down the road, I’d like to put in post-commit support in the web UI, and we might even go so far as to have a repository browser extension (after extensions support is rolled into the codebase), but it is there in post-review at least and several companies are using it happily.
2 On May 6, 2008 at 20:10, Keith wrote:
Cheers, Christian. The response is much appreciated.
I’ll definitely be taking a look at as it might, in fact, be what I was looking for.