Tools or suggestions for improving team code reviews?

[eurban]

Does anyone have suggestions on a good way to manage code/change reviews for a small team of 4?   We are required to have a team member review and approve our update set changes before we commit them to production, but have not been able to find a great way to review these changes in an efficient way.  

Right now we are creating documents in Google Docs that describe our changes and have screenshots of the things we did.   One example of the types of changes I mean would be adding a Catalog Item that has different types of additions like Variables, Client Scripts, UI Policies, and Script Includes.   Sure it is possible to go to the Update Set and click through each item, click on "Show Related Record", then click on the versions of interest to compare them, but that only allows us to view the changes and forces us to go back to some other communication method like writing questions in Google Docs or email.

To explain what kinds of functionality I am looking for, when working with a code repository managed through Subversion or Git, there are tools like CodeCollaborator or GitHub that make reviewing code changes very easy.   These tools present file diffs in a way that make it simple to quickly fly through changes to the code that are being submitted for review.   I don't have much experience with GitHub, so can't speak to that, but I really like the way CodeCollaborator allowed comments to be added to code changes that could be categorized in different ways and were also well organized and displayed nicely.

I know that ServiceNow has Team Development that seems to allow the enforcement and tracking of things like code reviews, but it appears that using Team Development is recommended more for teams that have multiple development instances in ServiceNow with more than the small amount of members our team has.   I also don't really see that it adds any of the functionality I am seeking that allows a nice way to review changes.

I have seen that Helsinki will support Git integration, so we might just have to wait for that, but we won't be upgrading to that for at least a year so in the meantime I am wondering how others handle peer reviews.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

[rajeevlochan82]

Hi Eric,

Even I heard that Helsinki will be providing a way to Manage code in git so that we can source control/ review codes. I do not think there is anything currently available for source control of code in ServiceNow. Team development do provide some way of reviewing but its no way close to source controls + lots of overhead for tracking changes and resolving conflicts.

Lets see how Helsinki goes with providing source control. Even we wait for few months before upgrading to any new version of ServiceNow

Thanks,

Rajeev Lochan

[Mike Allen]

JIRA is an industry leader for SDLC, but I think you can easily build an app in SN that meets the needs of a small team.   You can add a field to update set that is the reviewer, and don't let the update set go to complete until that field is filled in.   You could probably even disallow Complete for your own update sets, forcing another user to move it to complete for you after code review is done.