Code review goodness with ReviewBoard

The City of Ottawa’s Web group required a code inspection tool to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) section 6.6 “Code Review”. I investigated a couple of solutions, both open source and commercial, that fit our need for a fast, Web 2.0, side-by-side diff, inline comments, LDAP supported, and feature rich tool. It seems that Atlassian’s Crucible (purchase), Smartbear’s CodeCollaborator (purchase), and ReviewBoard (open source MIT license) were the pack leaders. I had used Crucible at Nortel and I really liked that product, but it was costly. Since I ❤ open source alternatives rather to paying for license fees, I opted to try ReviewBoard first. There was one problem though, the City is a Microsoft shop and we use Team Foundation Server (TFS) <grumble> as our source control repository but ReviewBoard didn’t list TFS in its supported repositories. Hrm…

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