[mtlynch]

This is cool! I'm happy to see more options in this space.

The best code review tool I've ever used was a tool at Google called Critique.[0] They've open-sourced it as Gerrit[1], but there are sadly no hosted versions available for under $15k/yr, and it's complicated to self-host.

I've been using Reviewable, and my experience has been good not great. Github's native code review has caught up a bit, but Github's review tool falls apart if your review lasts more than one round.

Here are my gripes with Reviewable:

Steep learning curve - Every new developer who joins the team spends their first few reviews being confused and frustrated by Reviewable.

Performance - Reviewable has awful performance. It takes about 10 seconds to load a code review. It seems like it's doing some odd websockets stuff where sometimes my "connection" to Reviewable will drop and I can't add comments. I've never experienced this with any other web app. It's gotten better over the last few years, but it's still annoyingly frequent.

Complicated configuration - I just want the reviewer to be able to hit an "LGTM" button to mark their approval. Reviewable's decision about when a PR is approved is based on this complicated function combining whether the reviewer typed the text ":lgtm", how many people looked at the review, whether they also hit the approve button. Each repo has its own configuration, and I can't make org-level changes without changing every repo one at a time.

Excessive permissions - This might be a Github thing, but you can't grant Reviewable permissions to a particular private repo - you have to grant it permissions to all of your private repos. Several developers who join my team need to create a dedicated Github account to avoid exposing their other private repos to Reviewable.

Thread state is unclear - The options are "discussing", "satisfied," "blocking," or "working," and it's not obvious who's supposed to move the thread to what state at what point.

No development - I've been a paying customer of Reviewable for about 7 years, and I can remember only 1-2 minor features that have been added during that time. They haven't updated their blog[2] in 6 years, and they've never communicated with me as a paying customer to tell me anything they're doing.

I checked out Crocodile, and it looks like it has potential. I'm not sure I'd pitch it to my team to switch yet. Here are some of my thoughts:

* When do the reviewer's comments become visible to the author? One of the must-have features for me is that both author and reviwer(s) can prepare a set of notes, but they're not visible to anyone else until they hit "publish" to share them with the team. Sometimes I make comments in one spot, and then as I read more of the code, I revise a previous comment. If all my comments publish immediately, I can't revise comments like that. Github, Reviewable, and Gerrit all support a flow of preparing comments and then committing them in a separate step.

* Crocodile touts the floating thread thing, and I've never used a tool that has it, but it doesn't seem better to me. Inline comments do break the flow, but floating comments actually cover up the code and prevent me from reading it. I see I can close threads, but I can't figure out how to get them back.

* Being able to comment on character-level granularity is cool!

* I think your thread state is better than Reviewable's, but I'd prefer an even simpler model where threads are either "open" or "resolved." When an author responds to a comment, the default action is to resolve it, but the author can override the default and leave it "open" if their comment is asking for clarification rather than declaring a fix. The reviewer can reopen a thread if they feel that the author has misunderstood the note. 95% of the time in my reviews, the reviewer makes a note and the author resolves it, so having a whole extra confirmation phase for that last 5% feels unnecessary when the reviewer can just reopen it instead.

* Ditto for review state. The only two states I've ever needed for a code review are "pending approval" and "approved." I've never wanted to mark a PR as "rejected" unless it's just a spam submission from a stranger on an open-source repo, and even then, I'd close it from Github rather than my code review tool. The worst I'll do to a teammate is withhold approval until they address my notes, but I'd never mark it as "rejected." I don't need an explicit state for "pending review" or "waiting for author" because if the author is the last commenter, it's implicitly pending review.

* I like that there's a view of all the comments at once. I like to review all my comments before pushing them to the author.

* I'd like a way to mark a comment as "no action required" when I just want to say something nice[2] about the code that doesn't require action from the author.

* I couldn't understand the "iterations" UI control. It's not obvious to me what the different circles represent.[4] Once I compared two diffs, I couldn't figure out how to compare to the the full PR to the base branch (i.e., all commits aggregated). I think it's replicating a control that Reviewable actually does pretty well, so I recommend giving it a look for inspiration.

* It looks like I'm only allowed to make code-level comments, but I'd like to make review-level comments as well for high-level notes about the review as a whole.

Hope that's useful. I'm very interested in code reviews, so if you want to do user interviews, feel free to reach out. You can find my contact info through my HN profile.

[0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch19.html

[1] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

[2] http://blog.reviewable.io/

[3] https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-2/#offer-sincere-prais...

[4] https://i.imgur.com/3ZhDAR1.png

[jameslao]

I can see how the iterations control can be not obvious. I'll add a docs section that explains it. The two columns of radio buttons represent your selection for the left and right side of the diff. You can also click on any iteration to diff it against the base.

I've made a couple notes based on this to help me prioritize next. Thanks for taking the time to provide all this amazing feedback!

[gregmfoster]

Sounds like have some really thoughtful opinions regarding code review tools!

> "Being able to comment on character-level granularity is cool!" This is something that I really like too - I'd go so far as to say PR titles, file names, etc, nearly everything should be commentable.

Have you checked out graphite.dev? Its iterating rapidly and incorporating a lot of what Phabricator and Gerrit did well.

[mtlynch]

From looking at the website, Graphite seems much more focused on the stacked PRs aspect than reviewing aspect. I'm not as interested in the stacked review aspect, honestly.

Not sure if you've gotten this feedback, but the demos on your website are illegible. They're squeezing a terminal session into a tiny 350px width box:

https://i.imgur.com/UBnNWNT.png

Also, would be good to disclose that you're the co-founder if you're commenting about it publicly.

[piotrkaminski]

Hey, thanks for the feedback on Reviewable! You make some really good points:

> Steep learning curve

Guilty as charged. I think it's cohesive and efficient once you learn it but the learning curve is quite steep. We keep trying to think of ways to flatten it a bit but haven't had any great ideas so far. If you have thoughts on this -- or could point us to a great UX designer with dev tools experience -- it would be much appreciated!

> Performance

There are some obvious things we're working towards to improve it but these days most reviews load in 3-4 seconds for me, even on a not-very-awesome laptop. What kind of platform are you seeing 10 second load times on, and how's your Internet latency to us-central? Please open an issue and we can work through it together.

> Complicated configuration

Yeah, there's a lot of support for legacy and highly customized workflows in there. But these days the primary and default integration is with GitHub's approve/request changes workflow, which gives you one-click approve -- have you tried using that? (Efficient multi-repo config updates are also on the todo list, but never quite rose to the top.)

> Excessive permissions

This is an unavoidable side-effect of using GitHub's OAuth authorization mechanism. GitHub Apps allow finer-grained permissions but they didn't exist when we created Reviewable and don't have a good answer for listing PRs, which would make our dashboard significantly less useful. We do have a transition planned out but at this point our main customers are enterprise folks who run their own GHE Server and don't much care about fine-grained permissions, so the ROI doesn't pencil out.

> Thread state is unclear

Huh, I'm surprised by this one. The basic flow is: 1. Reviewer creates a discussion (disposition defaults to Blocking). 2. Author responds with questions/comments (disposition defaults to Discussing). 3. Reviewer clarifies (disposition unchanged) or clicks the big Resolve button (disposition changes to Satisfied, discussion is resolved). 4. Author addresses the comment and clicks the big Done button (disposition changes to Satisfied). 5. Reviewer checks and, if satisfied, clicks Resolve (disposition changes to Satisfied and discussion is resolved).

Basically, at every step you either reply to keep the discussion going, or click the button to indicate that you're fine with closing it out. You shouldn't even need to care about the specific disposition unless you're trying to run more advanced workflows.

> No development

Yeah, I pretty much abandoned the blog and should probably take it down. However, we do ship new features regularly and post updates on Headway [1]. These should also pop up as the "red circle new stuff counter" in the UI, but perhaps your browser is blocking that third-party connection. (Headway only gets major feature posts, but there's a lot more work going on in the background that's only reported on the enterprise changelog [2].) I'm not a fan of spammy email newsletters so we don't send those.

Again, thanks for the feedback, and don't be a stranger -- it's easy to reach us through email, chat, issues, etc., and we respond promptly to every message. Even if we have to hunt them down on HN. :)

[1] https://headwayapp.co/reviewable-changelog [2] https://github.com/Reviewable/Reviewable/blob/master/enterpr...

[mtlynch]

Thanks for the gracious responses, Piotr! I didn't write that with you in mind, so I hope it doesn't come across as too critical. I have been a happy customer for 7 years.

>>Thread state is unclear

>Huh, I'm surprised by this one...

>Basically, at every step you either reply to keep the discussion going, or click the button to indicate that you're fine with closing it out.

I think there are two problems here:

1) It's not obvious enough that a user is supposed to declare a state after writing a response 2) There are more states than necessary

For (1), the UI flow doesn't hint to the user that they're supposed to do anything after they type their reply. I just tried it and I see this:

https://i.imgur.com/DimycTB.png

It sounds like you're saying the expectation is that users click the circle at the upper right and then choose a state, but that hasn't been obvious to anyone I've introduced to Reviewable.

For (2), this is more personal opinion, but I think comment threads are similar to Github issues in that there only need to be two states: closed or open. The states Reviewable offers to me as the author are:

(1) Discussing, (2) Satisfied, (3) Blocking, (4) Working, (5) Pondering

1, 3, 4, and 5 are all "open" for my purposes, and (2) is closed. It's rare in my experience for a developer to respond halfway through a round of review to say they're still working on or pondering a comment, so I don't need dedicated states for that. They can just keep it open and write a comment like "still working on this one!" I don't see a difference between (1) and (3), as all notes are blocking until they're resolved.

My somewhat controversial opinion is that the author and reviewer should trust each other enough that the author can respond to a note and mark it resolved without awaiting confirmation from the reviewer who wrote the note. It's rare in my experience for an author to incorrectly resolve a note, and when it happens, the reviewer can just reopen it and say, "Hey, I think there was a misunderstanding on this one, and the changes haven't addressed this note." I think forcing the flow into "Discussing" -> "Pending resolution" -> "Confirm resolution" just adds needless friction.

>You shouldn't even need to care about the specific disposition unless you're trying to run more advanced workflows.

We don't, but I see it as a missed opportunity because there's useful information there.

In Critique, it was easy to see at a glance whether a note was active or resolved (active notes had an orange background and resolved notes had a gray background IIRC). In Reviewable, we have to read all the notes more closely to see which are active and which are resolved.

>I'm not a fan of spammy email newsletters so we don't send those.

I don't like those when it's baldly trying to wring more money out of me, but I like it when vendors tell me what's going on and how they're improving the product.

[piotrkaminski]

No worries, feedback of any kind is always welcome, and direct if diplomatic feedback is the best -- which is exactly what you wrote. :) Let me know if you'd like to chat directly at any point, we love talking to our users.

> 1) It's not obvious enough that a user is supposed to declare a state after writing a response

That's because you don't need to declare a state after writing a response. :) The basic workflow is simple: click the button if you're in favor of ending the discussion, otherwise write a response. For more advanced workflows, yes, you can explicitly select a disposition from the dropdown, or prefix your message with a magic keyword to do so automatically.

> For (2), this is more personal opinion, but I think comment threads are similar to Github issues in that there only need to be two states: closed or open.

You're conflating two separate things: each discussion has a state (open -> in progress, closed -> resolved in Reviewable parlance), but so does each participant. The discussion's state is a function of all the participants' states, allowing for a consensus to develop in multi-party reviews without giving any one person the power to unilaterally close the discussion. There are three basic participant states:

Blocking -> prevent discussion from resolving Satisfied -> in favor of resolving discussion Discussing -> neutral; not my monkeys, not my problem

The other two states you mentioned are specialized and affect other features besides the discussion state:

Working -> like Blocking, but also "keeps the ball in your court", so Reviewable knows you're still responsible for further progress on this discussion and won't list it as needing a reply from other participants; it's usually employed by a PR author who agrees with a request but wants to reply with further details before they've actually done the work.

Pondering -> this prevents a draft from being sent when you publish; useful for "notes to self" as you read through the code that may or may not become actual issues you want to raise, and that you don't want to accidentally publish as-is.

It's not a simple system but we figure you've got GitHub for that, so we choose to err on the side of powerful.

> My somewhat controversial opinion is that the author and reviewer should trust each other enough that the author can respond to a note and mark it resolved without awaiting confirmation from the reviewer who wrote the note.

You can do that too! If you initiate a discussion as Discussing, then if the author clicks the Done button (switching to Satisfied) the discussion will automatically be resolved, with no further input from you. You can change your default disposition for discussions created as a reviewer if that's how you prefer to work; see https://docs.reviewable.io/discussions.html#resolution-workf... for details.

> In Critique, it was easy to see at a glance whether a note was active or resolved

In Reviewable, resolved notes are collapsed into the title bar (if just resolved) or into a gutter icon (afterwards), so usually you won't even see them. I'm confused when you say that you can't tell which are active and which are resolved, but perhaps we differ in our understanding of what "resolved" means.

[depr]

Have you used Review Board?

[mtlynch]

No, I'd never heard of it. It looks interesting, but I'm kind of skeptical that a tool designed for reviewing images and source code can be as good as a tool that's dedicated to code review.