At Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:13:26 -0700, Jeff Garland wrote:
Note that I'm not mentioning the name of the tool just yet because I don't want to violate our 'advertising policies' on the list.
I think you're being overly cautious. Atlassian?
Fair enough:
I've heard very good things about that product.
If there's interest, I can make initial contact with company and get/post the details on how it would work. I was planning to propose this at BoostCon, but now that it's come up we should start the process now if folks agree.
Using a code review tool is an awesome idea. Many reviews are not attached to code, but you can put review comments in documentation just as well.
Documentation is a bit harder unless you are annotating the document source directly
Yes, that's what I was suggesting.
-- that is, I haven't see a mode in the tool to annotate against 'rendered html'.
That *would* be a nice feature, wouldn't it!? I don't think I've ever seen such a tool. Wait, that's not true. See http://djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01/ for an example.
A couple of things to consider:
1. We'd still need a place for overall assessments that don't pertain to specific details.
There's an 'overall comments' section at the top of each review for these kinds of comments.
Yeaaaaaah... do you think putting that kind of commentary in the same place as a code review would work for our review process, though? Maybe it would, but I have a hard time envisioning it.
2. I know this is a bold predicition, but I think we will be transitioning to GitHub. It has an enormous momentum in the open source world, is responsive, and will continue to make a lot more sense as Boost is modularized. GitHub already supports code review. I think I'd rather go with a tool that requires absolutely no sysadmin on our part, is a known quantity to many already, etc.
I haven't used the github review capabilities here -- so we'd have to evaluate what works best. As for the admin -- it's truly minimal -- basically the same as giving someone sandbox access today -- registering an email address so that comment discussions are tracked, etc. And the author has to upload code to the tool -- but a simple paragraph should be about enough to explain it.
I mean someone has to install the tool, administer the system on which it runs, ensure that there's always enough CPU power/bandwidth, manage upgrades, etc. Also I don't love the need to upload code. Having the tool built into a code repo/sharing system removes steps and *should* make things run more smoothly (no separate login, for example). One thing I do like very much about centering the process on a code review tool is that people can poke through making comments, etc., and then after they've taken a good look, consider voting and adding an overall write-up. That is, you can get into it incrementally. That's a lot harder with the current system. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com