Update on CodeStriker
Nick very nicely installed CodeStriker on our local network (integrated into our CVS repository) after I’d pinged him with a few test review items from the demo version.
The upshot is that we’re not going to use it just at the minute. It looks promising, but doesn’t offer enough value just yet (and I haven’t got the time to spend helping out with it unfortunately).
- I think it's a bit too chatty - you get an email for each comment generated and if you wanted to review an entire file, then that'd be a lot of email. I guess some per-user configuration (a la Bugzilla) or a way for the reviewer to say "review over, send email now", or something to digest the changes in a topic would be best.
- There doesn't seem to be a way to specify the latest version of a file (on a branch) in CVS when creating a topic - so you have to go find out the revision number by hand
- We could use it for reviewing fixes for bugs (all bug fixes have to be reviewed before they're committed to CVS), but the majority case is where the fix is fine, and approved with no changes, so it's a bit heavier process-wise than "fix suggested in branch *blah*", "Fix approved" comments in Bugzilla and would still require the branch plus the fixer would have to create a new CodeStriker topic.
I guess in order for it to be useful with our current process, creating the topic would just require the name of the branch with the suggested fix and the bug id, and it would then add the suggested fix comment to bugzilla (including the name of the branch and a link to the CodeStriker topic), reassign the bug in bugzilla to the reviewer, and then do the reassigning back to the fixer when the code review got to an “Approved” state. And even then it wouldn’t add too much over what we already do.
What I really want is something that gives me Microsoft Word reviewing capabilities on source code, so that can be used for full code reviews…