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Comment by Xelank | Hacker News Reader

What code review tool do people actually use for a PR-based workflow? My company has been recently looking for better code review tools than Bitbucket's.

A few key features I'm looking for:

- Incremental review: show what files has changed since last review (ideally what lines)

- Timeline view: See what have happened since you last reviewed it

- Custom "PR Approved" rules + indicator: e.g. 3 approvals + build passed. This gives us an easy way to see whether a change is ready to be merged and released.

A lot of these features can be found in (what seems to me to be) trunk-based, pre-commit style tools like Phabricator and Gerrit. However I'm not sure whether the extra tooling (i.e. ramp up cost and complexity) is worth the return. Does anyone have any experience as to how switching over yielded good gains?

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If you're willing to use GitHub, then https://reviewable.io has all the features listed above and more.

Disclosure: I'm the founder.

reviewable is probably my favourite at the moment which ticked all my boxes, though it involves switching over to github which may or may not happen.

Do you have any more advanced example of real code reviews using reviewable? Seems like there isn't a easy way to find more advanced examples (I found one particular one for Rust, but I can't seem to find a way to navigate to other code reviews of the same project)

I should do a better job of tracking "interesting" reviews, but for now the easiest way to find some is to poke around the PRs of some open source projects that have adopted Reviewable, for example https://github.com/servo/servo/pulls, https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pulls, and https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pulls. Each PR will have a link to the corresponding review in its description.

Let me know if you need anything else!

Thanks for the links! Having a list of cool PRs definitely helps conversion :)

We used PR based review before, but we found it is hard and inefficient when many changes are required. Its hard to see whether comments is being addressed in Bitbucket PR. We switched to Phabricator recently, and the incremental reviews really helps.

I think you can go over your previous PRs, and see how many of them has multiple rounds of reviews. If most of them are minor changes/fixes, then switching maybe unnecessary.

Thanks for your input. There definitely is a lot of back and forth and I consider it a very good thing. It's interesting because it's a chicken-and-egg problem - if your tool is painful to use, then team members are less likely to participate seriously.

(What I'm really wondering though is whether incremental code reviews are specific to the pre-commit model. In theory I don't think this is the case since tools like Upsource has it as well)

Anyway, what was your experience migrating the team to Phabricator? What's the general workflow from starting a new feature to getting it to prod? Cheers

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