SmartBear’s Code Collaborator for Code Reviews

We’ve been using SmartBear’s Code Collaborator at BWA on the engineering side for a few months and I think it has worked out real well. I recently forced it upon Tech Art and we’re seeing immediate gains and I’d highly recommend the product.

The big problem we had (on Tech Art and Engineering teams other than the Tools team I’m on) is that we had no ‘culture of code reviews.’ Everyone just paid lip service to them- even me, because I was never really allowed to be as forceful with requiring over-the-shoulder reviews before all check-ins as I wanted to be. So I’d do most reviews after-the-fact, which was slow, via the clunky format of email, and would often go unheeded.

Code Collaborator, most of all, provides an automatic culture adjustment, because suddenly code reviews are a formal part of the checkin process. This may be obvious or absurd, depending on your experience. But it took a true formalization of the concept via a concrete (and polished!) tool like Code Collaborator to get us where we need to be regarding code quality and code reviews.

I just wanted to put that out there, as I’m up at midnight doing code reviews…