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Code Review as a Service

pullrequest.com

11–20 of 238 posts

Re: Code Review as a Service

#11
post #9

There's no way that Google would actually use this service.

SaaS apps tend to slap a logo up when there’s a single free trial account with a @google.com email address.

(In this case, they seem to be claiming Google engineers are moonlighting as reviewers, not using the service for reviewing Google’s code.)

Re: Code Review as a Service

#12
This implies that you have no-one in your team to do code reviews and that you're fine allowing random third parties access to your infrastructure and a peek into your projects and code base... Both the premise and the proposed solution sound very odd to me.

Re: Code Review as a Service

#13
post #9

There's no way that Google would actually use this service.

SaaS apps tend to slap a logo up when there’s a single free trial account with a @google.com email address. (In this case, they seem to be claiming Google engineers are moonlighting as reviewers, not using the service for reviewing Google’s code.)

They have the Google logo in both "Work with world-class engineers" and "See why thousands of teams trust PullRequest". With the latter being next to the customer testimony section, if they are only suggesting that Google engineers do the reviewing that's quite disingenuous.

Re: Code Review as a Service

#15
post #2

Interested to know if anyone has used this service or similar and what the quality is like.

It is new to me, but raises a concern that they could only review for general engineering quality, not whether or not a PR is appropriate to a codebase. How would they know if the same problem has already been solved elsewhere, that no wheels are being re-invented, or that a PR is stepping on the toes of something else the team is working on. Because that is the value I've found in code reviews - not generic "is this…

I guess you could first have an internal architect or similar vet the PR before handing the PR to this service for the "technical details".

As you said, the big value in reviews are the points you mentioned. Correctness/technical quality certainly has value, but at $700/dev/month the reviews better be really good. Especially since doing it internally has value as well (knowledge sharing in particular).

Re: Code Review as a Service

#16

Having on-demand engineers look at code, without broader context on the project it is in my view the same as something that can be automated either or both via static analysis and custom ci/cd workflow checks. This can probably makes sense on a project with more junior engineers where many basic improvements can be supposedly suggested without needing broader context? I would be keen on hearing the use case

I have reviewed for pullrequest and you’d be surprised how many things one can fix. Why do you think that you don’t have context? You can look at the whole project and see what’s up.

And no, you can’t write programs to do this.

Re: Code Review as a Service

#17
I'd have some amount of healthy skepticism over obvious concerns (most prominently, keeping IP safe) but it also it seems worth a shot; it solves a real problem because often for teams code reviews are a bottleneck and bit of a battlefield.

Re: Code Review as a Service

#18
post #9

There's no way that Google would actually use this service.

SaaS apps tend to slap a logo up when there’s a single free trial account with a @google.com email address. (In this case, they seem to be claiming Google engineers are moonlighting as reviewers, not using the service for reviewing Google’s code.)

Google has invested in pullrequest and some engineers review for pull request

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/07/pullrequest-pulls-in-2-3m-...

Re: Code Review as a Service

#19
post #5

I will admit that I thought this was a joke on the "SaaS" everything trend. I can see how this works for fairly limited web applications for example, but as soon as the application grows in complexity and interacts within a bigger system of systems, I am doubtful that it would be logistically possible to outsource the code review (legally, knowledge transfer wise, and a plethora of other angles I'm a tad bit lazy to…

Overall, for bigger and more complicated systems you would have an architecture that is peer reviewed and communicated internally.

Afterwards you have individual components that have their code reviews and still need to follow industry best practices. I think external code reviews is great idea as it could allow the team to focus more on conceptual reviews and consequences to other systems.

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