Lightweight code reviews using TortoiseSVN

Published: 2011-12-30 by Lars  toolscollaboration

I believe that it is often a good idea to have another set of eyes looking at the code I write. The questions and comments resulting from such a code review indicate its value:

Code reviews can be done in many ways. Some prefer pair programming: review the code as it is being written, while others prefer to work alone writing the code and then having someone review it afterwards. Some companies have a policy mandating code reviews before the code is comitted, while others others prefer to increase the flow by allowing code reviews after commit. A discussion of the pros and cons of these different approaches in different situations is worth a seperate post.

Lately I have wanted to do code reviews after commits on one of our projects. To make it as easy as possible to manage the code reviews, I have looked for a tool that allowed me to easily mark commits with the name of a reviewer, and easily get a list of commits not yet marked as reviewed. GitHub has built-in support for code reviews of pull requests. However I needed a solution that worked with our SVN repository. Several dedicated code review tools exist, but I was discouraged by the complexity added by those tools.

Then I found a simple solution utilizing a feature in TortoiseSVN that was made for integration with issue trackers. Now I can use the Log window in TortoiseSVN to see which commits have been reviewed by whom. Here is a sample screenshot:

I can search for commits that have not yet been reviewed:

If the code was written by a pair, the name of your partner can be written directly in the commit dialog, see this sample screenshot:

If the code is reviewed some time after the commit, the commit can be marked as reviewed by adding the review information in the Edit Log Message dialog:

To configure TortoiseSVN to behave in this way, all you have to do is to commit the following revision properties on the root folder of your project:

Thanks to the TortoiseSVN team for making such a great versatile product!

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