Crucible

What do you like best?

Crucible can be linked with any version control system (svc, git etc..). It allows collaborative reviews where a code review owner can add someone in a team as the moderator allowing the other person to act as owner on his behalf if needed. It provides a nice dashboard of users who added comments on the code allowing people to track comments individually per developer. The UI is great and pretty straightforward with all the files for a code branch showing up in the left sidebar and the files content/code showing up on the right. Any additional screenshots/files can be attached as evidence to the code review. The most notable feature which separates crucible from Github pull requests is the time tracking functionality. It starts tracking time from when the code review was marked as open and also as to how much time each user has put on looking at the code review. Another feature that is better than github's pull request is that even if a large number of files is present in a code review, the left sidebar has it's own scrolling pane which makes it easier to keep the context of files with the code presented in the right pane. For github pull requests, the user has to keep on scrolling which tends to get irritating. Another great feature of crucible is that code from multiple repositories/projects can be added to one code review.. again a feature which github pull request does not provide.

What do you dislike?

One thing I find irritating is that adding new files to the code review after the review has started resets everyone's code review progress. Ideally the behavior is correct since we want people to take look at the new changes but sometimes it gets irritating to ask people to re-review things when the changes are trivial.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Using crucible has made code collaboration very easy. No longer do we have to get the team in a room to review code together. This allows people to prioritize their work and looking at code reviews at their own schedule.