Effective code review without the overheadMore review, less pain.

Code Review

Code reviews are great for improving software quality; that's well known. However, nobody has ever claimed that code reviews are fun. The best intentions to perform code reviews are too often beaten by tight deadlines, poorly planned review meetings, neglected emails and fatigue from chasing review participants. We can't guarantee you'll enjoy code reviews, but Crucible will give you a fighting chance to adopt this best practice activity.

To review is to comment

The essence of a code review is an author receiving timely feedback on his or her changes. In an online review, these take the form of general comments and defect comments. Crucible supports fully threaded comments at the level of entire reviews, whole files and specific source lines.

Inline comments are attached to specific lines of code in a revision, or more commonly lines in a diff (code change comparison). Adding comments is simply a matter of opening the review and clicking on some code.

Crucible supports advanced features such as flagging defects, custom classifications, and the automated creation of JIRA subtasks.

Have fully threaded conversations.

Have fully threaded conversations.

  • Have fully threaded conversations.
  • Simply click on some lines to add comments.
  • Comments can be displayed inline, next to the code they refer to.
  • Flag a comment as a defect to highlight it.

Adaptable to your team's needs

In software development, what works for one team may be an anathema to another. This is never more pronounced than when your team discusses review practices. Between reviews, one process will never be perfectly appropriate for every situation or change. Some reviews might be a simple spot-check, whereas others warrant detailed analysis by several members of the team.

Crucible is intended to make life easier by staying out of your way. It's designed to be flexible enough to be effective in both the lightweight and the formal worlds. With a lightweight approach, anyone can decide what requires a review, who's involved, and when it's finished. When you want to reign things in, with per-project control you can enforce a hierarchy that defines specific people approving and signing off reviews.

Customise the style of review per project by setting defaults and modifying permissions.

Customise the style of review per project by setting defaults and modifying permissions.

  • Customise the style of review per project by setting defaults and modifying permissions.
  • You can use the classic review roles Moderator, Author and Reviewer or let anyone do anything.
  • Permission schemes let you control what reviewers can do based on roles, groups or individual users.

Staying in control

It might be easy to do reviews with Crucible, but unfortunately that doesn't mean the reviews will magically conduct themselves. Crucible provides multiple features to help your team keep on top of the review workload.

  • Notifcations - email and RSS feeds
  • Activity streams - that let you browse recent comments across a whole project or instance
  • Due dates - to help your reviewers prioritise
  • Blocker reports - so you can identify the slackers holding up reviews
  • Progress indicators - give you a quick indication of where people are up to
  • Time tracking - understand how many hours are being spent reviewing so you can evaluate ROI over time
Use the activity streams to keep on top of review activity.

Use the activity streams to keep on top of review activity.

  • Use the activity streams to keep on top of review activity.
  • Subscribe to review updates with email or RSS.
  • Quickly see what reviews are happening.
  • Find out who is holding reviews up.