Code review is an essential part of the development process. It lets you identify problems with your code before it is implemented and helps reduce the time spent on fixing bugs.
In this blog, we’ll explain what the code review process is and what tools you can use to automate it.
What is the code review process?
Code review is an important process of orderly testing of software to find and remove errors, bugs, overflows, and other vulnerabilities found in the code. A good code review process is constructive, limited, and instructive. It helps prevent potential problems from reaching production, ensuring higher software quality and reliability.
It is important to review code because:
- Improves code readability
- Improves code quality
- Creates better documentation
- Optimizes code for better performance
- Knowledge sharing
- Detects potential security vulnerabilities
This process directly impacts the review time. For example, If reviewers are overloaded with work, they take time to review the respective code. As a result, the review time will increase which further results in high cycle time.
Why code review tools are important?
- Code review tools automate and streamline the review process. Hence, making it more efficient and decreasing the review time.
- Manual code review, while effective, can be time-consuming and prone to oversight of code issues. These tools can help provide a clear structure for the review and ensure code quality and consistency.
- Code review tools help in getting a clear audit trail of the review process. For example, Who reviewed the code, when it was reviewed, and feedback provided.
- These tools facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
- Code review tools are useful for security testing as they enable thorough examination of code for vulnerabilities, enhancing overall software security.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the most popular code review tools:
Top 10 code review tools
Typo’s automated code review tool identifies issues in your code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps your code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
Key features:
- Supports top 8 languages including C++ and C#
- Understands the context of the code and fixes issues accurately
- Optimizes code efficiently
- Standardizes code and reduces the risk of a security breach
- Provides automated debugging with detailed explanations
It is a well-known open-source code repository tool with an in-built lightweight code review tool in its pull request. Hence, developers can easily integrate code reviews into their workflow.
Key features:
- Simple, User-friendly UI
- Includes a code scanner feature to identify vulnerabilities
- Provides detailed oversight of changes in code files
- Allow developers to follow up and revisit past reviews
- Graphic representation of current status
Price:
Free plan available; paid plans start from $4 per user, per month
It is an automated review tool for static analysis. Supporting more than 40+ programming languages, Codacy also integrates with various popular tools and CI/CD workflows.
Key features:
- Gives a clear picture of how projects are doing and how their quality is changing over time
- Adaptable to your code review process
- Provides code coverage
- Helps in knowing the amount of technical debt
- Can identify duplication and poor code metric areas
Price:
Free for open source teams; paid plans start from $15 per month
It is a code hosting and collaboration tool from Atlassian. Bitbucket can easily integrate with other Atlassian tools like Jira, Bamboo, Jenkins, and many more.
Key features:
- Provides a forum to discuss changes before they are merged into a new project
- Offers built-in issue tracker
- Includes automated pipeline build process
- Creates tasks out of code review comments
- Automatically integrates security scans and test results into the pull request view
Price:
Free plan available; paid plans start from $3 per user, per month
It is a leading code review tool for projects with large repositories. Gerrit works as a median between a developer and the central repository.
Key features:
- Incorporates a voting system
- Includes REST-like API that allows customized automation
- Combines the functionality of the review tool and bug tracker into one
- Includes many customization options
- Helps in finding the error in the source code
Price
Free plan available
It is a code review tool that is built on a SaaS model. It helps in analyzing code from a security standpoint.
Key features:
- Gives test coverage by using binary code/bytecode
- Automates different workflows with integrated and streamlined testing in SDLC
- Offers set of two code review tools – Static analysis and software composition analysis
- Provides mitigation management
- Integrated into existing debugging systems
Price:
Custom pricing model as per users’ requirements
It is a code review platform that offers an integrated tool for Subversion, Mercurial, and Git. Rhodecode has in-built security features for secure software development.
Key features:
- Includes unified repository management
- Provides workflow automation
- Integrates seamlessly with your existing projects
- Helps navigate the history of your project across various branches
- Can provide feedback with inline code reviews
Price:
Free plan available; paid plans start from $8 per user, per month
It is a free, open-source, web-based document review tool that lets you perform both pre-commit and post-commit code reviews based on your requirements.
Key features:
- Offers smart indentation handling for code review
- Private, secure, and in control
- Integrates seamlessly with a wide range of version control systems
- Allows reviewing code as well as PDFs, documentation, and graphics
- streamlines the review workflow with Slack, Asana, Jenkin, Trello
Price:
Free plan available; paid plans start from $29 per user, per month
JetBrains Space code review tool allows you to integrate code reviews seamlessly into your development pipeline and deploys on Docker containers, making it an ideal code review tool for private and public clouds.
Key features:
- Easy to install via plugins
- Works across all JetBrains IDEs
- Allow developers to create merge requests, provide comments, and approve changes without leaving the IDEs
- Offers various automation tools, issue trackers and other project management features to streamline code review
- Provides chat-like review conversations that allow engineering teams to track and manage changes easily
Price:
Free plan available; paid plans start from $8 per user, per month.
Microsoft’s Azure DevOps code review tool is built into its Azure Repos. It supports a pull request review workflow and provides a suite of tools that streamline cross-department collaboration.
Key features:
- Its feature – Artifacts, a package management tool that supports Python, npm, Maven, and NuGet from public and private sources
- Can set up detailed and strict code review policies
- Supports a diverse range of repositories
- Provides semantic code search
- Includes exploratory and manual testing tools
Price:
The basic plan is free for teams of five, then $6 per month for each additional user
Code review best practices
Below are a few code review best practices that software development teams must follow:
- Create a code review checklist. The code review checklist includes a predetermined set of questions and rules that the team members will follow during the code review process.
- The code review process must be an opportunity for growth and knowledge sharing rather than a critique of developers’ abilities. To have effective code reviews, It is vital to create a culture of collaboration and learning.
- Instead of focusing on all the changes altogether, focus on a small section to examine all aspects thoroughly. It is advisable to break them into small, manageable chunks to identify potential issues and offer suggestions for improvement.
- One of the code review practices is to provide feedback that is specific, honest, and actionable. Constructive feedback is important in building rapport with your software development team. The feedback should point out the right direction rather than a confusion.
- Code review is a vital process yet it can be time-consuming. Hence, automate what can be automated. Use code review tools like those mentioned above to improve the code quality issues and increase the level of speed, precision, and consistency. This allows reviewers to take more time in giving valuable feedback, automate, track changes, and enable easy collaboration.
A comprehensive code review ensures the development project meets high-quality standards.
Conclusion
The manual code review process can be time-consuming and requires more effort. Hence, automated code review tools are at your rescue, offering efficiency and accuracy in assessing your code base.
There are many code review tools available in the market. We have mentioned a few best tools in this article. Choose a tool that fits right for your organization, perform code analysis effortlessly, and ensure that it ticks off everything mentioned in your code review checklist.
All the best! 🙂
