Previewing Crucible at SD West 2006

Crucible, a code review tool from fine folks at Cenqua, is finally closing in on a real beta release. (Disclaimer we’re already use Cenqua’s Clover product.) I talked to Brendan from Cenqua at SD West 2006, and he explained that Crucible was supposed to be Cenqua’s second project after Clover. Turns out Fisheye was a lot more popular than they anticipated. Thus Crucible got pushed back.

It’s still not quite beta ready, maybe early next month, but it looks like it may really fit the bill for our needs with a simple lightweight code review process. It sits on top of Fisheye their CVS/Subversion browsing product.

Some nice features they bravely previewed for us:

  • AJAX style commenting while browsing code for the review.
  • Very simple workflow with email/RSS notifications.
  • Nice defaults for the attributes. If my memory serves right there were only two types of severity to an issue in the code <div class="codecolorer-container text vibrant overflow-off" style="overflow:auto;white-space:nowrap;">
    1
    major

    </div>

    or

    1
    minor

    .</li> </ul>

    The really nice thing is it didn’t try to do anything more. Simple is generally better on features especially when we’re trying to have lightweight code reviews. I’ll probably post again on it after getting a chance to play with a future beta.