What's New in Review Board

We recently opened up to you all about the future of Review Board and the challenges of creating and sustaining an ethical business built around an Open Source product and keeping its development funded in a difficult market.

It hasn’t always been easy, but your responses reminded us why we do this. The outpouring of support, encouragement, and thoughtful feedback left us deeply appreciative and inspired. We’re grateful to have such a passionate and dedicated community behind us — our users are truly the heart of Review Board’s success, and we want to keep building for you.

This year, Review Board celebrates its 18th birthday, marking nearly two decades of helping developers create and collaborate together more effectively. It’s humbling to think back to those early days when we built a tool simply because we were frustrated with e-mailing diffs back and forth for review. The days before Git took off, the days before pull requests existed. Before the market was dominated by 800 pound gorillas and AI-focused upstarts. Our attempt at a modest solution to a common pain point has grown into a tool relied on by thousands of teams around the world, helping build products people enjoy and rely on every day.

Our way of saying thanks and hoping for your business

To thank you all and to celebrate 18 years of Review Board, we’re offering an 18% discount on all new Power Pack licenses and support contracts purchased through the end of the year. Your discount will last for the full 1 year term of any license or contract.

Power Pack and support contracts are how we fund Review Board’s development and how we keep food on our tables. If you depend on Review Board today, you can help us ensure we’re around for years to come. Lock in your 18% discount by purchasing Power Pack today, or talk to us at sales@beanbaginc.com if you’d like to discuss support, Purchase Orders, or billing that meets your year-end or new-year budget cycles.

And thank you once again for helping support Review Board!

— Christian, David, and Michelle from Beanbag

It's been a while since we've talked about the future of Review Board, and we felt it was time. We have some important topics to discuss.

We Need Your Help

We love working on this product. We began developing it in 2006, back before GitHub and Pull Requests existed. Back when code review was done over e-mail, bug trackers, and whiteboards, if it was done at all. It was a painful process, and we knew we had to innovate. Commenting directly on the code, viewing interdiffs, multi-line commenting, filterable dashboards, integration with other tools—all of it was new. Many of those inventions have since become standard across the market.

That's almost 20 years of helping make code review what it is today. But that could change. The instability in the tech sector, the downsizing, the cost-cutting… It's impacted us.

Review Board is open source and will remain so. We've never required a fee to use the software. Continued development is instead funded through support contracts, Power Pack, and sponsored feature development as part of our company, Beanbag, Inc.

We'd like to share some facts you may not know:

1. Beanbag is a small company. We are three very dedicated people developing Review Board and our family of products.
2. We're self-sufficient, living off the sales we work hard to earn and keep. We're not burning through VC money or operating as a loss leader for a giant tech company.
3. Microsoft and GitHub have been doing what they’re good at: dominating the market, putting smaller companies out of business, and making it hard for the rest of us to stand out, stay funded, and innovate.
4. Review Board is used in a wide range of industries, at companies of all sizes, for software and hardware development, but…
5. Over 98% of our install base uses Review Board completely for free.

To put it simply, the future of Review Board depends on us making sales.

We have a lot planned for this product. We've been working toward some big changes, capabilities no tool on the market is even exploring, and we want to see our vision through.

We're fighting to make that happen.

But we do need your help.

If your company is using Review Board today and finds any value in it at all, we'd like to talk to you directly to find out:

1. What you get out of Review Board today.
2. What would keep you using Review Board tomorrow.
3. If there’s an opportunity to work with your company on a support contract, Power Pack license, or sponsored development. We'll work with you to meet your budgets.

If you're open to discussion, please reach out directly, and we'll schedule time to talk with you or anyone from your company.

What We're Working On

Here's just a taste of what we've been building and setting the groundwork to build:

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) review and diffing.
• Google Docs review and diffing.
• New innovations for improving the code review process, visualizing code, and aiding in very large reviews (we're keeping some of these under wraps for now).
• Deep pull request integration with GitHub and GitLab, letting you combine the best of their services and the best of ours.
• A reworked Dashboard for better filtering and tracking of review status and workloads.
• More organizational control over access policies and custom review request approval flows.

These are just some of our plans.

Are we on the right track? Can you help us get there?

Thanks for your time,
Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge
Creators of Review Board

The big tech news this week has been CVE-2021-44228, the vulnerability in Log4j2, a widely-used logging library for Java.

We've received a lot of questions as to whether Review Board is impacted.

The answer is no. Review Board is not impacted by the Log4j2 vulnerability. It's written in Python and JavaScript, and we do not make use of Java or Log4j2 anywhere in our stack.

However, Review Board may talk to other services in your network that use Log4j2, which themselves may be impacted. We recommend thoroughly auditing your infrastructure at this time.

This is a pretty rough issue, and we want to acknowledge and praise the hard work and long hours so many people are putting in to address this issue, both inside and outside the Log4j2 project. If your company depends on Log4j2, or any other critical open source components, consider reaching out to those projects to see how you can help give back.

Updated 6-January-2018, 2:12AM PST: We seem to be back up and running. It's not clear yet what happened, but we'd like to thank whoever at Google turned the group back on! We'll keep an eye on this over the coming days.

Today, we became aware that our community support group, hosted by Google Groups, was blocked due to a report of malicious content. We're not sure yet if this was a spam protection mechanism on Google's side determining that some content (such as a snippet of source code pasted as part of a support request) was malicious, or if someone intentionally or unintentionally reported the group to Google for abuse. We've reached out to Google and are investigating this.

Right now, since the portal is down, there are a few other option for support:

• You can post to the reviewboard-dev group. We typically use this for issues related to the development of Review Board or third-party extensions, but are opening it up for now to all discussion.
• You can post to the /r/reviewboard subreddit. This is a pretty new, low-activity subreddit we've been using for announcements, but is a fine place to ask more basic questions and have discussions.
• If you need private support, you can file a support ticket. We generally require a support contract for any support tickets here, but until this issue is resolved, we're accepting community support requests.

We know this is annoying, and we're looking into new options for community support going forward that would prevent this from ever happening again. Please reach out to us through any of the above methods if you have any questions. We'll keep this post updated when the support portal comes back online.

Hello, everyone! Christian Hammond here, one of the founders of Review Board and Beanbag.

We have a webinar coming up on Upgrading Your Team's Code Review Experience using Review Board, hosted by Bitnami. We'll be going over the importance and benefits of code review, how Review Board can help save you time and sanity during the code and document review process (did you know that you can review documents and images?), and we'll talk about some of the upcoming features of Review Board 3.0 that you're going to like.

There will also be a demo followed by a Q&A. This is a great opportunity to ask us anything you might want to know about Review Board.

The webinar starts on July 12th at 9AM PST (4PM UTC). Join us! You can register for the webinar if you want to attend or see the recording once it's over. If you have teammates, managers, or friends who might be interested, please forward this along to them and ask them to register as well. It helps us to have a good head count.

Hope to see you there!

— Christian

10 years ago, David Trowbridge and I (Christian Hammond) began talking about the problems and annoyances with code review, and how it could be better. Code review at the time was (usually) a very tedious process where you'd e-mail diff files around and reply to them, and while there were a couple of tools on the market, they were expensive and cumbersome.

So on September 27, 2006, ten years ago today, we landed our first commit.

r1 | chipx86 | 2006-09-27 00:25:53 -0700 (Wed, 27 Sep 2006) | 2 lines

    Add the reviewboard.

Where we were back then

Back in 2006, there was no GitHub or Bitbucket. Git was just around a year old. Subversion and Google Code were the tools choice of most open source projects. Many companies performed code reviews on whiteboards or projectors.

And people still e-mailed diffs around.

We just knew things could be better, so we began writing Review Board. We didn't know if it'd be a short-lived toy project, our new excuse for staying up all night coding, or if it could truly be more. It started off as just an experiment in improving how code review could be made better, could evolve, to make lives easier for developers.

The experiment was a success.

(We've come a long way since.)

Where we are today

Fast forward 10 years (!) and we have a product that we're proud to call our day job, a product that thousands of companies depend on every day. Hundreds of thousands of developers.

Over the years we've learned what works and what doesn't. We've greatly enhanced our code review capabilities, added support for many more types of code hosting services, wrote a powerful and comprehensive extension infrastructure and API, and helped change the world of code review for the better.

Our core team has expanded. We've put out 142 releases of Review Board alone (that's over 14 a year!), built a Review Board SaaS (RBCommons), added new enterprise-level features through Power Pack, and established support contracts with companies to help them through the good times and bad.

There are many code review tools on the market these days, and we're so glad to see that most developers no longer have to live in the dark ages of e-mailing diffs and projecting code up on walls. Throughout it all, Review Board has remained a strong, powerful, and beloved tool for so many, and we couldn't be happier.

Our users have been truly great. One company 3D printed Sparkly and Fish Trophies for us. Someone once wrote a poem for us ("Ode to Review Board"). We've been invited to give talks at big tech companies. We've mentored over 100 students as part of UCOSP and Open Academy, using Review Board development to help them prepare for their careers as software engineers.

It's been an amazing ride, and we're nowhere close to done.

Where we're going

We have several very exciting features in the works to bring your code quality to a new level. Our focus right now is on Review Board 3.0, which is bringing:

• A new and improved (but still familiar!) review experience
• Support for integrating with third-party services (like Slack, Asana, and more), allowing for as many distinct integration configurations as you need
• Built-in support for showing and handling feedback from automated code review services
• Improved search results and on-the-fly indexing, with support for Elasticsearch
• OAuth2 provider support
• Custom avatar services
• And much, much, much more

It's going to be a fantastic release. RBCommons users will get to see some of this soon!

In parallel, we've also been working on features for Review Board 4.0. The big highlight (and the feature being worked on now) is DVCS support, featuring some really useful takes on multi-commit review. We have some other great features planned, but aren't ready to announce them yet.

We've had an amazing 10 years, watching our little experiment grow and make a difference to customers around the world. We can't wait to see what the next 10 years have in store.

Happy birthday, Review Board!

Many of you may have heard that Google Code is going read-only starting tomorrow, and some have asked us how this will affect the project, since we host our bug tracker there.

Not to worry. Google's been nice enough to whitelist us for a little while, so even though most of Google Code will be down, we'll continue to be up. This is not permanent, but for the time-being, you'll still be able to report bugs at the old address.

Going forward, we'll be migrating off of Google Code and onto a new tracker. That will happen in the coming weeks, and we'll talk more about it when it happens.

So why the delay? Why did Google need to extend the shutdown date for us? We actually have something new on the way that we're pretty excited about. We call it Splat, and while still very young, it's shaping up to a pretty cool bug/issue tracker. We weren't quite prepared to switch over to it by the shutdown date, but we have enough of it ready to launch pretty soon.

There's a lot more that I'd like to say about Splat, but there will be time for that. We'll make a more formal announcement soon.

Today, Amazon released their all-new CodeCommit service as part of the Amazon Web Services family. CodeCommit is a Git repository hosting service built for scalability and reliability, helping to securely store encrypted versions of your code, binaries, and configuration related to your products and cloud infrastructure.

They've put together a guide on integrating AWS CodeCommit with Review Board that you can follow if you're wanting to give this service a try. It'll walk you through deploying a Review Board server, setting up access to CodeCommit, linking your repository, and posting changes for review.

Currently, setup requires maintaining an in-sync clone of your repository on the Review Board server. We're aiming to work with the CodeCommit team to help bring direct support for hosted CodeCommit repositories to a future release of Review Board and RBCommons.

For more information on getting set up, check out the CodeCommit page and read our guides on configuring Git repositories and our recommended RBTools workflows for Git.

We have two exciting announcements for you today!

Review Board 2.0.3

The first, which you've already guessed, is a brand-new Review Board release. In 2.0.3, you'll find a number of long-requested bug fixes, and some new features.

The highlights include:

• Empty files can now be posted for review.
• Users can now log in with their e-mail addresses instead of their usernames.
• Long, unbreakable lines in the diff viewer now wrap properly in all cases.
• GitLab v6.8+ servers with over 100 repositories now work.
• Far more useful sample crontab files, which are now auto-generated when upgrading your site.
• Counters in the dashboard should finally be fixed!
• Interdiffs are more reliable.
• Lots of Unicode-related bug fixes for diffs and Subversion have been squashed.

All-in-all, there are 23 bugs fixed in this release, and a few more new features we didn't even mention.

See the release notes for the full details.

Oh, and it also links to the new Package Store. And that brings us to:

The Review Board Package Store!

Today, we're happy to introduce the all-new Review Board Package Store, the new home for extensions and software that work with Review Board.

Administrators and end-users can browse the store for software to see what's out there to improve their Review Board experience.

Developers can post what they've made, show it off with screenshots, and let users know what's new with new release announcements.

The store is brand new, so we only have a few things up there right now. If you're a developer writing software that integrates with Review Board on any level, we'd like to encourage you to add it to the store.

We welcome any feedback on the new store. Bug reports, category suggestions, new features, or anything else that would make your life easier.

Earlier this year, we were proud to release our first commercial extension to Review Board, Power Pack. For the first time, documentation writers and developer teams could post and review PDF documents right from Review Board, without learning any new tools. Companies could bring GitHub Enterprise in-house without switching back to pull requests. Administrators could create a better experience by more easily scaling out across servers.

Since then, we’ve been working to improve Power Pack, listening to your requests and suggestions. Today, we’re happy to announce the beta program for our newest, most highly-requested feature: Power Pack Reports.

Get insight into your code reviews

Teams of all sizes can benefit from analyzing and measuring the effectiveness of code review amongst their developers. Better insight leads to better, more cost-effective processes and policies. To help with this, we're adding five different ways of looking at your code review process:

• Time to First Feedback

  This helpful graph shows how long, on average, it takes for new changes to be reviewed. See where the bottlenecks are in your team.

• Time to Close

  Some code reviews hang on for far too long, delaying releases. See how often this is happening, and where.

• Review Request Statistics

  A quick at-a-glance table showing statistics on how frequently team members post review requests, how many issues they typically have filed against them, and how many of those are dropped instead of fixed.

• Code Review Statistics

  More detailed metrics on the actual code reviews performed within the team. See who on your team are more actively reviewing code, how many issues they tend to find, and how frequently they mark Ship It! You'll have a better sense of who is really engaged in the code review process.

• Code Review Relationships

  This eye-catching diagram shows who's more actively reviewing who's code. It provides a great way of quickly seeing which parts of your team are working closely together, and who's not pulling their weight.

Try it out!

We have a lot of ideas in the works for this feature, but we want to get your feedback on the direction we're going.

If you think reporting would benefit your team, we'd love to have you as part of our beta! Your feedback will help to ensure this becomes an indispensable part of your code review process.

Please fill out our sign-up form to get started. We'll e-mail you as soon as the beta is ready.