- I am considering buying SmartBear Code Collaborator for mydev-team to help us coordinate and do code reviews. Cost is not the option/issue here, instead we want to get the right tool for the job.
- We have been using it here at work for a few years, and generally people do not like it at all.
- If you have a changelist of a few hundred small text files, be prepared to take an hour to upload it to the servers.
- The UI is horrid. The UI elements change size and move around when you click in them. The color scheme looks like it was designed by a drunk kindergarten child with too many crayons.
- The 'collaboration' mechansim forces you to type into a text box the size of a postage stamp. It cannot be resized. :(
- No syntax highlighting.
- Code reviews that have a lot of back and forth quickly break down under the weight of dozens of messages. Notice I said dozens... It is maddening to get stupid emails telling you that you have a new 'message'. Yet when you sign on, you can't find the new message out of all the old messages left behind.
- SmartBear's Code Collaborator takes all the chores associated with a code review and automates them. Packaging the code up for a review, providing feedback exactly on the line that you want to comment on, sending the feedback, responding to the feedback, arguing over a line or issue, and so on. Developers actually start to enjoy doing reviews. The defects that the reviews prevent are one of the most hairy ones. I had one of the best software engineers tell me that there was no way that the team would've found a given defect without the review, because it was obscured by other behaviors. But in the review they were staring at the code and the code didn't make sense, so they fixed it.
- We also coined the term "reverse code review." This is when an experienced software engineer sends a review to multiple less experienced software engineers with the intent of sharing a solution or teaching a pattern. It works well to improve the strength of the team.
- Two of my teams have used it so far, and both consider it a useful tool. The first team told me to figure out how to pay for it, because they don't want to give this tool up after the eval period was over... Disclaimer: I wrote a chapter for the Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review book. But that came only after we used the tool, and absolutely loved it.
- I mean, it's an argumentative question, but I liked the user experience, it's really easy to setup, learn and use.
- Just, in my experience, the most important part of peer code reviews is to start doing them and the tool itself is of second importance, you can use basically any diff tool. So, for small teams and project the Code Collaborator might be an overkill, there would be too much formalism.
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