Watch out for the striker

For the longest time now, we have been doing code reviews the old fashioned way.  We would print out the code and two people would sit and review the code line-by-line.  Our notes were either attached to the code or written out and given to the developer beforehand.  This is was pretty much what we did when I was back at Raytheon, except we had more people involved. 

This morning, I came across a really good tool to help facilitate code reviews.  It is called Codestriker.  It is written in Perl and uses MySQL as a back end.  I put a version up on one of my Linux boxes and created a database on the MySQL cluster we have.  The tool is really feature-rich, in that it can work with CVS, SVN and other source code repositories.  I have at least three projects in the queue to review, and most of them are new.  So this morning, I uploaded the code to the tool.  Then I was able to review the code line-by-line.  To add a comment, all I needed to do was click on the line number.  Then when I review the code again, all of the lines that are in "red" have comments associated with them.  The benefits of this tool are:

1. You now have a history of all of the code reviews for a particular project.
2. It enables multiple reviewers to review code at the same time.
3. Developers can log in and address the codes prior to the actual review.
4. Did I mention its open source?

So if you are in the market for a good code review tool, give the striker a try.  I did bookmark on del.icio.us a number of other tools that are commercial products.