
Git commits as code review? - rayvega
http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/10/15/git-commits-as-code-review.aspx
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gruseom
The idea here is that when reviewing someone's code, instead of writing up the
problems that you found and handing the write-up to the author (which they may
or may not understand, and may or may not act on), you actually just fix the
code as you go, committing each little change you make with an explanatory
comment as the commit message. The author can then look over the history to
see not only what the comments were, but exactly what each one means in the
code. You're guaranteed that the problems are fixed, and (assuming the
original programmer actually does look over the history) the learning value is
much higher.

I've done exactly this on a couple of occasions and it worked very well. Among
other things, it's easier on the reviewer. (Who likes writing up a big
document or email? Much better to actually fix code.) Personally, though, I
find it more productive to work more collaboratively to begin with.

~~~
icefox
I do this for Arora when I get a commit that just needs a minor tweak. It is
easier to just merge in their patch and then make a new commit fixing it up
then to tell them to fix one thing, wait for them to actually do it, fetch,
and then merge. But for the patches where there are more fundamental design
changes it comes down to time. I could email them back with a list of things
to fix or spend the next few hours fixing it myself. If I am interested in
getting the patch in then I might.

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stcredzero
We are going to be using a code coverage tool in conjunction with our source
code management tool to do code reviews. Every branch of every method changed
for a particular Change Request will be instrumented with something subclassed
from a breakpoint, and the developers will get a randomly assigned "review
partner" and they will ensure all of the checked in code is covered by unit
tests.

The "coverage map" of affected methods is generated automatically, and the
insertion of the code probes is also done automatically.

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smcq
We use git commit reviews as our primary review method, it's much lower
overhead than sit down code review meetings. On the other hand, it's not quite
as thorough, which works fine with a small team that's already high bandwidth.

~~~
awa
Try <http://www.reviewboard.org/> or something like it

