Code Review With Crucible Closed BETA
code reviews, software development
Yesterday I went through an install of Crucible on our development server. It runs on top of their Fisheye product. I’ve actually been waiting a long time to check it out.
Install and configuration wasn’t bad, maybe an hour and mostly to have Fisheye index part of our CVS repository. Just for an experiment I grabbed one random file and started a review. The workflow has a minimal number of stages which is just fine.
create –> approve –> review –> summarize –> close
I setup the review and added about 5 comments. The other reviewer who had only seen a quick demo of Crucible months ago then added a response to the 4 comments, fixed one issue and checked it back in. I went back in and summarized the change and closed the review.
The impressive part was with no real explanation, the whole review took about 30 minutes asynchronously. Even though this is a pretty early beta it’s mature enough for us to start using for our reviews. And since it’s so lightweight we’ll probably end up doing more reviews. When I went over and talked to the developer on the review he mentioned we might not even have to have a formal review meeting.
Overall it appears to be a good fit for us, even if it took about 2 years from it’s initial announcement to get to this stage.
Ed Gibbs @ June 20, 2006
Ed,
Thanks for the heads up on Crucible / FishEye. I had never heard of these products before. I’m definitely going to check them out. We currently use ViewCVS and Codestriker and I’m quite interested in how these compare with them. Fisheye at first glance seems a little more advanced then ViewCVS.
I’ve used ViewCVS long ago, and it was OK, but not really nice enough for me to use it on any kind of regular basis. I think subversion’s web view is more sophisticated, but I still need to get around to installing it.
Fisheye is starting to add some tranparency to our repository which is nice. You can see what’s being checked in on a daily basis and browse the source with a click or two.
How does it compare with CodeStriker?
I haven’t every used Codestriker, but Crucible has a much more usable interface, and adding a comment is a single click and start typing. Of course it has a cost associated with it, but given that cost we’ve still gone with Crucible for now.