How to facilitate code reviews in a small team for embedded software?
- by Adam Lewis
Short Question
Does a cost-effective tool / workflow exist to facilitate code reviews in a small team? More specifically, a small team that relies on post-commit code reviews.
Background
Our team currently consists of 3 full time and 1 part time software engineers, with plans on hiring more in the near future. Due to our team size and volume of projects we all must juggle, the pre-commit workflow that major tools (such as Review Board and Code Collaborator) use is not obtainable for us right now. The best we can do at the moment is to perform post-commit reviews before major releases or as time permits. Nearly all of our projects are hosted on RepositoryHosting.com (which I highly recommend) and contain a mixture of SVN and GIT repositories.
Current Thoughts
Since I cannot find a tool that fits our needs right now, I am turning to TRAC that is built into our repository's site. At the moment we use TRAC to file tickets and track milestones, so to me this seems like a natural fit for code review results as well.
The direction I am heading in right now is to use a spread sheet(s) to log all of the bugs and comments. Do some macro magic to get it in a format that I can use TRAC's import ticket method and use TRAC's ticketing system to create the action items / bug reports automatically. The auto ticket generation is darn near a must have, adding in bugs and comments one at a time from a web-gui is really painful.
Secondary Question
If this workflow makes sense, is there a good / standard template to use as a code review log?