The benefits of code review are many. Not only does it help spot potential bugs, unhandled edge cases, less-than-perfectly-readable code, and architectural suboptimalities that the original developer may have missed; it also gives the reviewer a chance to learn about parts of the ode they don’t normally work on, and gives both parties a chance to learn new tricks, learn better style, and generally improve their coding skills.
The only problem is, doing code review right is hard. It’s a lot of work. If only our tools could make it easier…
And that brings us to the topic of this week’s Design Lunch, where Clint Talbert is going to talk about streamlining our code review process by integrating Bugzilla with one of two code-review tools: either Splinter or Reviewboard.
Clint will be looking for feedback on which tool to choose, on what workflows it needs to be able to support, and other aspects of the code-reviewing user experience.
As usual, the Design Lunch is 12:30pm Pacific time this Thursday, in Ten-Forward in the Mountain View office, and anyone is welcome to call in or to watch on air.mozilla.com.
Not The User's Fault 
May 5, 2010 at 1:20 pm
The current review process is all before-the-fact. What about some after-the-fact checking? We already have test suites, and of course if no binary is produced the tinderbox will burst into flames. But what about compilation warnings? I did my first Mozilla compile with amazing success this week (SeaMonkey), but I was surprised to see that the word “Warning” appeared (irrespective of case) 27941 times in the configure-and-build log. That’s a lot. Some of these were about non-ISO-C90-C++98-compatible code (e.g. strings longer, sometimes much longer, than 509 characters) and can probably be safely ignored; but many were about data items that might be used uninitialized, and could lead to difficult-to-debug sporadic bugs if they aren’t false alarms.
May 5, 2010 at 5:50 pm
This really rocks..!! really needed. Review board seems good choice. Really nice UI. Have some reservations for statistics from review board. I like code striker which has “Comment Type”. This integration is really needed. Not just via jetpack. Something built into Bugzilla so it can integrate with others. Some sort of API / spec for it ?