
Ask HN: Do you use any code review tool/service? - symbolepro
Are code review tools really helpful? Is it worth paying for them?
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mfluderx
I use a code review service as I believe that code reviews are important,
especially on old legacy code.

I pay for code reviews in the UK from a company called Atlas Computer Systems
Ltd [https://www.atlascode.com/](https://www.atlascode.com/)

They do code reviews for startups to make sure your code is high quality and
isn't building technical debt.

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peteevans
In a lot of business code reviews are compulsory (or at least some sort of
inspection) and often required for accreditation. There is often a convenient
change set from version control tools such as SVN/GIT etc that can be used to
define review content and these change set often have associated diff tools to
help. On previous projects we'd just branch every change in SVN and get
someone else to check the changeset to merge onto trunk. Saying that we are
currently using JIRA with associated code review tools and this is great and
provides a nice log of comments and responses which we can present to QA (as
review evidence) on a simple web interface. Reviewing the code is a great way
of sharing the knowledge in addition to finding bugs earlier (if done well).

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JoachimSchipper
We do line-by-line code reviews of all changes (high-assurance software, so we
have to - but it's worth it anyway.) Some kind of tool is useful, since it
allows you to (a) review code on your own schedule, and (b) stores the
comments (for later review, if someone is on holiday, so that you can refer
back to your initial comment when reviewing an improvement, ...)

That said, code reviewing is a skill (and perhaps a talent), and _not_ the
same skill as software development; a degree of training - if just internal
and informal - is necessary.

Thorough code reviews take a significant fraction of the effort needed to
write the code in the first place; direct tooling costs are going to be
insignificant in comparison. (And note that e.g. Gerrit and even GitHub both
offer some degree of free tooling.)

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jetti
We use Crucible for our code reviews and I have been happy with it. We use the
Atlassian 'stack' so it integrates well with Jira and Bitbucket, which is
nice.

It is nice to have all changes highlighted and the ability to make comments on
line levels or file level so that the author, and team, can see what is going
on and get good feedback.

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twobyfour
We do code reviews, but I wouldn't use an automated tool for them. We treat
code review as an opportunity for communication, learning, institutional
knowledge transfer, and architecture review -- not as a way to enforce code
style or catch memory leaks. That's what linters are for.

