In the KIELER project we are conducting regular code reviews of (possibly) all of our sources. To make things easier, we do software assisted reviews in Crucible.

Review Scheme

Reviews are scheduled for every thursday. In the weekly KIELER meeting one author and two reviewers are chosen.

The author's job is then to do as follows:

• Choose about four Java classes that are to be reviewed
• Create a Review Task in Jira
• Create a review in Crucible
• Invite the two reviewers to the review

Now it is the reviewers's turn to perform the review:

• Read the source code of the class files in Crucible
• Understand the source code and the class files
• Write a comment if there is something that needs to be improved and mark the comment as defect
• If you want to put more emphasis in your opinion, create a corresponding Jira issue for the defect directly from Crucible
• Write a comment if there is anything that is not understood

Review Meeting

The week after, on Thursday, the review meeting takes place. In the Meeting the following exciting things happen

• The moderator welcomes the author and the reviewers to the meeting
• The moderator asks for further general remarks
• The moderator reads all comments aloud
• If there are any questions, reviewers or the author interrupt the moderator and start discussing
• The moderator keeps the discussion brief
• Finally, the moderator asks if any further remarks have arisen during the review

After the Review

After the review it is up to the author to finish any tasks that have been risen

• The author goes through all comments in Crucible and leaves a note about his decision
• The author may schedule a followup meeting which is only held online to review for example auxiliary classes
• The author adds a tag to the reviewed classes to mark them as reviewed according to the proposed rating (see below)

Code Tags

Design Reviews

When classes are ready for a design review, they should be marked with the following tag:

@kieler.design proposed <comment> 

After the design review has been performed, the same tag can be used to mark the reviewed classes by removing the proposed modifier and adapting the comment. The comment should contain the date of the code review and the login names of the attendees.

Code Reviews

All classes have initial code review rating red. The first code review lifts them to yellow, and the second one to green. The following tag marks classes that are ready for the first code review:

@kieler.rating proposed yellow <comment>

After the code review has been performed, the same tag can be used to mark the reviewed classes by removing the proposed modifier and adapting the comment. Similarly, the second code review can be marked using the green modifier. The comment should contain the date of the code review, the login names of the attendees, and the ID of the code review in Crucible (such as KI-15).

Review Overview Page

The design and code review tags are processed automatically using a custom doclet during Bamboo builds. The result is displayed in a generated HTML page:

http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/rating/