A Comparison of Code Review Processes

Over the past few days, I have looked over a pair of software package communities online that are ideally releasing their intellectual property under to different open source licenses in order to juxtapose any distinct difference between popular code reviewing techniques used in today's world.

My first example would have to be the community at the OpenMW project who I've been religiously following for a few years now. They have been operating under the GNU GPL version 3 license. Code reviewing and bug tracking in this project is maintained and updated using a project management app known as Redmine. Unfortunately, they have no readily available documentation that explicitly outlines their standards of coding practices, despite the presence of the correlating tab on the site. The features that clearly shines through in its ease of access and readability is the issue tracker and the roadmap being displayed. The issue tracker clearly indicates the issue type, priority, subject, assignee, and dates created and updated. Once the issue is clicked on, many further details are displayed as well as any related progress and discussion surrounding it. A great example of this can be seen here.

This next software project is called SilverStripe CMS - an open source web management tool. Their software is licensed under the BSD License, which they argue is more flexible and less restrictive than the GPL in cases such as companies wanting to integrate SilverStripe code into their product without revealing any custom codes of their own. SilverStripe now uses the familiar Github revision control system for issue tracking. In close similarity with the previously shown Redmine app, it incorporates easily accessible tickets for features and bugs that can be described, discussed, and updated on the same webpage. It also works in conjunction with its git environment where any changes are "pushed" and "pulled" by the appropriate users into the repository as necessary to achieve a specified milestone. Documentation on using some of the introductory features of git and github can be seen here.

Both of the projects found exhibit great use of tools to communicate and attain their personal goals, with the major difference being the more organized and hierarchical nature of SilverStripe which I would surmise is due to the breadth and age of the project itself, with its community being leagues larger than OpenMW's.