Source Code Review Systems

Inspections are a well-established, cost-effective way to find defects. But they are not universally used. There are many reasons, including the lack of training on how to do inspections well, the need for project managers to move resources away from testing into inspections, and the large amount of paperwork that formal inspections require. Because of these problems, the software inspections program at Soluris had withered away. When the software engineering group at Soluris decided to relaunch inspection process, they did two things. First, they purchased Peer Reviews in Software by Karl Wiegers. It helped them fix inspection process by describing how to have an inspection meeting, how much to limit the length of the items under inspection, and what data to collect to justify the inspections over the long term. Second, they selected a software tool to automate our inspections process and thus eliminate the paper forms. This article compares two open source tools ugzilla and Codestriker - and three commercial tools - the CodeReview add-on for Visual Studio .Net, CodeReviewer, and ReviewPro.