

Code reviews at Google - frognibble
http://thebogles.com/blog/2010/06/code-reviews-at-google/

======
curtis
After my experience with code reviews at Google, I came to the conclusion that
Mondrian had some definite deficiencies. On the other hand, later at Mozilla,
we did code reviews without any real tool support at all. That was a lot
worse. I wrote up some of my thoughts in a blog post which you can find at
[http://curtisb.posterous.com/what-should-mozilla-look-for-
in...](http://curtisb.posterous.com/what-should-mozilla-look-for-in-an-
automated).

~~~
houseabsolute
> Mondrian had some definite deficiencies

You mean like its approximately two 8s uptime? :P I do think you're spot on
about how Mondrian encourages the nit-picking and doesn't do enough to
encourage structural discussions. On the other hand, maybe those discussions
should be had before there's any code to review. So . . . meh. Tough problem.

~~~
brg
I found structural discussions took place in the free form areas of mondrian,
and knit-picking was a direct result of two aspects: 1) An strict, but oft
changed style guideline 2) The requirement to say _something_ beyond LGTM to
prove that the code review was thorough.

The one aspect I missed at Google compared to other large software companies
was design document reviews. I found that in writing and disseminating such
documents a lot of good work was done.

~~~
curtis
_I found structural discussions took place in the free form areas of mondrian,
..._

I wonder if this part of Mondrian has been improved since I was at Google.
There was a freeform area, but it wasn't really good for much, as I recall.

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andymoe
<http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/> has almost all the features mentioned and they
are really really useful. Free for up to two users with the students and
startup discount. The free link takes a bit of digging to find if I remember
correctly.

edit:

kiln: <http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/StudentAndStartup.html>

Better yet sign up for fogbugz and add kiln on to fogbugz:

<http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/StudentAndStartup.html>

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dlsspy
I've been using gerrit extensively lately. It's a great review system on top
of git.

I work with people around the world on software -- including people I've never
met who decide to contribute a change (which enters the same workflow as a
project lead). It's just awesome.

------
brown9-2
Blog currently seems down, Google's cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://thebogles.com/blog/2010/06/code-
reviews-at-google/&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

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AnneTheAgile
The open source implementation, Rietveld [ <http://code.google.com/p/rietveld>
], sounds very interesting. Perhaps it could be used in programming classes
and might also fit in with pair programming training.

~~~
sandGorgon
does using Rietveld mean that one has to use the app-engine ?

~~~
dlsspy
gerrit was originally a port of rietveld for git, but is its own thing now.
You run it on your own machine.

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MarcusA
I see that Rietveld is only a part of Mondrian or at least described as "not
the full Mondrian tool". Googlers, what are the differences between the two.
Wonder why the full Mondrian tool couldn't be released.

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topbanana
I like Atlassian's Crucible for code reviews. Worth checking out if you have
some budget for this sort of thing

