Roughly two years ago, David Trowbridge and I began development of Review Board for use in our open source projects and our team at VMware. During that time, we’ve turned Review Board into a powerful code review tool that works with a variety of version control systems. Most of VMware has moved over to it, as have an estimated 50-100 companies world-wide. We’ve had over 100 contributors to the project, people providing volunteer support on the mailing list, and people have developed third party tools for integrating with Review Board.
After all this time in development, with this many people contributing, we decided it’s probably time to get a release out there. Sure, we could have done this a long time ago, but there’s a number of large things we were hoping to get in (a recently-committed UI rewrite, for instance). Now that we have most of the major features we want for our 1.0 release, we decided it was time for an alpha.
Over the coming months, we’ll be working on stabilizing the codebase, fixing a few large remaining usability quirks, enhancing performance, and writing some proper documentation (which is coming along nicely).
We’re eager to get a quality product out there and to begin development on the next release. There’s a lot of neat things planned:
- Support for writing extensions to Review Board.
- A fully-featured API covering every operation you’ll need to perform.
- Some degree of policy support (specifying which users/groups can see which parts of a repository, for instance).
- Reviews with statuses other than “Ship It”. This will probably be customizable to some degree.
- Possibly some theme customization to allow Review Board to blend in better with corporate sites, Trac installs, etc.
Along with this, I plan to roll out a new website for the project that will have a browseable list of third party extensions, apps, Greasemonkey scripts, and more.
We have more information on our release on our release announcement.
Congrats, looking forward to 1.0.
Looks like a great tool, the website is having a few issues though – almost all of the links at the top give a weird 404 error.
I’m not seeing this at all. What links, and what does the 404 look like?
Woohoo! Awesome job Christian!!! =:) Keep up the great work!!
Great work Christian!
No Git support?
@Petteri: We have Git support. We need to improve it for remote Git support, but plenty of people have it working with Git. I’m going to be working on beefing it up pretty soon and developing against it.
Thanks for the information about Git support. I’ll have to keep an eye about the the development, since with Git support review board will rock 🙂
Looking forward for this, thanks!
p.s. Paul Betts, all the links work well.