Review Board

Review Board is open source code and document review software from Beanbag, run on your own servers or hosted on RBCommons, for Git, Perforce and ClearCase.

Review Board gives a development team one place to discuss a change before it lands, whether that change is source code, a design document or an image. Beanbag, Inc. builds and maintains it as an independent company and calls code review its specialty. The software is open source and runs inside a company's own network, air-gapped sites included, from installers or Docker containers. Teams that would rather not run a server can have Beanbag host it on RBCommons. Work centres on the diff viewer, where reviewers comment on specific lines and can raise a comment as an issue that the author resolves or discards. The Dashboard gathers every review request waiting on a person across all projects, with filters for incoming, outgoing and starred items. Default reviewers add people or groups to a request based on the file paths it touches. Review Bot runs static analysis tools such as flake8, ShellCheck and PMD, plus a Secret Scanner, and posts their findings as review comments. RBTools supplies rbt post, which turns a working directory into a new or updated review request, and rbt land, which commits the approved change. Power Pack brings Document Review, reports on time to first review and time to close, and support for enterprise repositories. The tool suits engineering groups that need review data to stay on their own servers. It also fits companies that mix version control systems, since Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Subversion, ClearCase and Azure DevOps repositories sit side by side in one instance. Beanbag builds it for hardware development as well as software, so teams on ClearCase or Keysight SOS are part of its audience. Its Community plan is aimed at open source and personal projects. Teams that want help pick between running it themselves with support from Beanbag's own developers and handing the server to RBCommons. Day-to-day jobs include checking a change before it is committed, signing off specifications, diagrams and contracts, and reviewing images and game assets before release. The record of comments, issues and approvals doubles as an audit trail of why each change went in. Code can stay on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or a company's own Perforce server while the discussion runs in one place, apart from the code host. New requests reach the team through Slack or Microsoft Teams, and builds connect through Jenkins or CircleCI. Through its Python extension framework, WebHooks and REST API, a team can add its own review checks or track compliance requirements.