By Steve
McKay and Jason Robbins, Open Source Team
Code reviews are
the rule at Google -- peer review reduces bugs, increases code quality, reduces maintenance
cost, opens up team communication, and helps get the job done right the first time.
Like many open source developers, Google engineers used to rely on mail and
textual diffs when doing code reviews. That made code reviews a drag. Mondrian, a web based code review tool, made the process much more
efficient by presenting the diffs and comments right in our browser. Mondrian inspired the
open source project Review Board, and led to Rietveld, and now the new
code review tools are available on Google Code's Project Hosting.
Reviewing code in your project is simple: browse any source file or
diff, double click on a source line to add comments, then publish your comments along with a
general comment and score for the revision.
