Peer Code Review Tool – Code Collaborator
Recently, I’ve started working closely with the Digital Publishing product team here at Adobe to transition a V1 project over to the team to continue development. One of the really great tools I’ve been exposed to is a peer code review tool called ‘Code Collaborator‘ … While code reviews always sound good, they’re rarely done as they require an extra meeting, essentially, that nobody has time for.
Code Collaborator solves this by a providing a highly functional web-based workflow tool that hooks into your source-code repository (Perforce, , and provides a very quick and easy way to check out changes, comment on them, gather feedback, mark defects, and approve code reviews. This is a great way to increase code quality and consistency, and provides a method for developers to keep up to date with each other, and even learn from each other. It does actually make code review fun!
An aside about defect tracking. On the current project, it sounds like code collaborator defects track at about 20% or so of bugs filed by QE. This is a substantial percentage of bugs that are caught early!
From my experience, Code Collaborator from SmartBear is a good, functional tool despite the ugly UI. I’d be interested in hearing of other useful peer code review tools that people are using.
Thanks for this awesome review of our product, CodeCollaborator (yep, the marketing team recently took out the space). I’m glad we’re accomplishing our goal of making code reviews not only possible, but also fun.
As for the UI, it’s true that it needs some work. We’re working on it, I promise.
Comment by Brandon DuRette — September 15, 2010 @ 1:37 pm