The only time I can see this being useful is on solo developer projects, and solo developers probably can't afford it.
Code Review as a Service
41–50 of 238 posts
Re: Code Review as a Service
#42This entirely misses the point of code review. Say it with me: Code review is a knowledge transfer exercise. Finding bugs, security vulnerabilities, and keeping the code maintainable are merely side effects that we appreciate along the way. The primary purpose of code review is increasing the bus factor of the given piece of code and facilitating organic knowledge transfer. That's it.
i thought code review was to assert dominance and to block as long as possible for yak shaving reasons; But I do like your version of it! Happy holidays~
Re: Code Review as a Service
#43I 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.
I've yet to see a company ask for feedback once they were done pushing out a half baked API. And if anyone uses it, they do get plenty of feedback. As far as whether the code is internally badly written... if the guy writing the code can understand the suggestion, he's probably already done it or decided why not to do it. If he can't understand the suggestion, then it's a waste of money.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#44I'm all for this if the person reviewing my code will know the context, history and all the details and conversations we had as a team.
But in order for that to work, I'd probably be taking most of this reviewer's time. And obviously in order for them to get up to speed with our practices, conventions, architecture, code style and whatnot, they'd probably need to start by doing a whole lot of development on our project first. At least several months. They could probably not do anyone elses code review then. So we'd have to pay them... one full time salary to be this coder-and-reviewer type person. I wonder what this service should be called.
I think I might be onto something here. "Full time developers as a service"
Re: Code Review as a Service
#45And I’m guessing their reviewers work for free, like on Code Review Stack Exchange?
Or are these people working for relative poverty wages overseas?
Re: Code Review as a Service
#46Putting aside IP and feasibility concerns, what is the longterm roadmap? This is obviously not a VC scalable product business if it acts as a broker to (albeit expensive) human consultants.
Are they hoping to get enough training data from the consulting practice to bootstrap an AI code review product?
Re: Code Review as a Service
#47I'm all for this if the person reviewing my code will know the context, history and all the details and conversations we had as a team. But in order for that to work, I'd probably be taking most of this reviewer's time. And obviously in order for them to get up to speed with our practices, conventions, architecture, code style and whatnot, they'd probably need to start by doing a whole lot of development on our proje…
While I agree in general, some forms of code reviewing require less context than others. They say "We review within your tools to catch security threats, stop crashes, and fix performance issues before they reach production.", and it does seem to me that these things are less a matter of style/context than just noticing potential issues. Not sure though, I had the exact same thoughts as you when first seeing this.
Edit: to be clear, I personally don't see the value here, just playing devil's advocate.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#48On top of what others have already flagged this is a big no for any companies security & compliance. Why would any company share their private codebase ?
Re: Code Review as a Service
#49I hope my boss doesn't think, "It's cheaper to pay for this service than for us to review our own PRs. Outsource ++!"
Re: Code Review as a Service
#50I'm imagining that to make such service profitable, offering something like $699 per developer per month, you are not hiring reviewers from USA, right?
When I saw the 200/hour pricing I thought "that actually sounds reasonable", but how is 699/month for unlimited review going to work out?
This tells me that the pricing model is likely based on a previous usage study. They must have found that the average user requests less than 2.5hrs of code reviews per month. Otherwise, the pricing doesn’t make sense to me.