Design Lunch: Code review in Bugzilla

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.

 

Design Lunch: Atul Varma on Bugzilla Dashboard

Over the years there have been a lot of discussions of how to improve Bugzilla’s powerful-but-intimidating interface. Again and again these explorations seem to run aground on the jagged rocks of “Well, if we change anything, we’ll break it for all the existing users who depend on it for their daily work.”

Atul Varma has a promising approach: Leave Bugzilla itself right where it is, but use its APIs to build a new, simpler, high-level interface that abstracts away a lot of the sordid details.

And that’s the topic of this week’s Design Lunch. Atul will be presenting his “Bugzilla Dashboard” and looking for feedback on the design.

The Design Lunch will be, as usual, 12:30 PM Pacific time this Thursday, at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View. It will be recorded and broadcast on air mozilla; instructions for watching or calling in are here.