Review Board Workflows¶

There are many ways you can use Review Board, depending on the code review strategy, source code management system, and internal policies.

This page covers the general workflows for pre-commit review and post-commit review.

We also have detailed guides for using Review Board with specific source code management systems:

Using Pre-Commit Review¶

Review Board supports many different workflows, but most people use a pre-commit review model. This is considered a Best Practice for code review.

Review Board is built to fully support the pre-commit review process:

Make a change to your local source tree.
Create a review request for your new change.

This can be done through the web or, more commonly, through the rbt post command line tool (which integrates with all supported repositories).
Publish the review request and wait for your reviewers to see it on their Dashboard.
Wait for feedback from the reviewers.

Reviewers can discuss the change, open issues, or approve the change.
If reviewers have opened issues to request changes:
1. Update the code in your tree.
2. Update the review request with your new change, and describe those changes in the update.
3. Publish the review request.
4. GOTO 4.
If reviewers approve the change (“Ship It!”):
1. Push your change to the upstream repository.
2. Click Close ‣ Completed on the review request action bar.
  
  This may happen automatically, if the repository is configured to auto-close review requests.

Post-commit review is less common in modern development, but is still a supported workflow in Review Board:

Make changes to your source tree and push them upstream.
Create a review request for your new change.

You can browse through the list of commits within Review Board and then post it for review, or use the rbt post command line tool to post instead.
Publish the review request and wait for your reviewers to see it on their Dashboard.

Reviewers can discuss the change, open issues, or approve the change.
Wait for feedback from the reviewers.
If reviewers have opened issues to request changes:
1. Create new commits with the fixes and push them upstream.
2. Update the review request with your new change, and describe those changes in the update.
  
  You will need to update this with a new commit by either uploading a new diff or using rbt post.
3. Publish the review request.
4. GOTO 4.
If reviewers approve the change (“Ship It!”):
1. Click Close ‣ Completed on the review request action bar.
  
  This may happen automatically, if the repository is configured to auto-close review requests.

Note that some features in Review Board (such as interdiffs) are built with a pre-commit review workflow in mind.