Review Board has changed the way we review code changes, enforce high quality coding standards and styles, and generally mentor new developers. Every time you visit search.yahoo.com you use code that has been reviewed on review board. We're great fans of your work!— Yahoo! Web Search
For too long, code reviews have been too much of a chore. This is largely due to the lack of quality tools available, leaving developers to resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based solutions.
At VMware, we've traditionally done code reviews over e-mail. A significant amount of time was wasted in forming review requests, switching between the diff and the e-mail, and trying to understand what parts of the code the reviewer was referring to. We decided to fix all that.
Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.
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Detailed review requestsAll the information on a change is available at a glance. Authors can modify the information quickly and easily through the web UI. Screenshots can be added and commented on. Review requests can be created through the "New Review Request" page, or updated through the post-review tool on compatible revision control systems, making it easy to file new review requests. |
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Powerful diff viewerDiffs are no longer something you just read. Now you can interact with them, commenting directly on the lines you're reviewing. The comments, along with the lines of the diff, will appear on the review. Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to jump around the diff. For example, pressing "n" will jump to the next changed chunk, while "p" will jump to the previous. To improve readability, we display syntax highlighting in the diff and show the changes within a lines in a "replace" block. Every revision of a diff is stored. This allows the user to look at any revision of the diff and also to see the differences between revisions. This is especially valuable when there are several iterations of large diffs. |
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Comment and review dialogReviews of code are made in the Comment dialog on the diff viewer page. Clicking a line or a comment flag will take you here, allowing you to comment on the review. When finished, the review can be finalized and published on the Review tab. |
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Contextual discussions and reviewsYou already know that comments can be made directly on lines in the diff. Following that contextual model, we display discussions, comments, and lines of the diff inline on reviews. This allows people to read top to bottom and know exactly what people are talking about. We even display clips of commented regions of screenshots! |
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The dashboardEvery user gets a dashboard, which displays the list of outgoing and incoming reviews. You'll never miss a review request again. The dashboard is customizable. Columns can be rearranged, new columns can be added and unwanted columns can be removed. The dashboard can be sorted using two-level sorting. |