Friday, October 06, 2006

Crucible - code reviewing tool

I was recently reading an excellent article on the development of a 'coding factory'; in this article it referenced Crucible as a code review tool. I registered for EAP and downloaded version 0.7.

I was very impressed with this tool (despite its inability to support IBM Clearcase as a SCM). Crucible is a code-reviewing servelt / web tool which hooks into the project's SCM. Once hooked in, all code can be reviewed and comments inlined. The main advantage of this is that it allows code reviews to be done continuously. Much like pairing and the obvious advantages in quality with which this provides, Crucible allows for other developer's to touch and review the code leave comments that relate to particular lines / patterns. A workflow is automatically generated allowing the comments on the code to be looked at, and if necessary refactored into the code. I can see that the main advantage of this would be onshore / offshore development as it would allow online review and feedback loops to be aligned to the project / iteration lifecycle. Secondary to this, it is a great way for more senior developers to break new starters / graduates out of poor coding styles , or even as a means to stage gate code going to test / production.

Now if only I could work on a project that used subversion or cvs to test this out!

4 comments:

Roy said...

Checkout "Code Collaborator" - it supports ClearCase and lots of other SCMs as well.

- a Smart Bear

Roy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Roy said...

Whoops - here's a link: Code Collaborator

Ellen Feaheny said...

Nice review/article. There's now a plugin for Crucible 1.6.1 that supports ClearCase.

For the record - Check it out.