Introduction

JCR is a web application for conducting formal code reviews. It can be used for reviews of any type of source code, although it has some special smarts for reviewing Java projects. It has special features to make large-scale reviews not only practical but easy and fast.

JCR is intended to assist:

• Reviewers. All changes to code are highlighted, and syntax highlighting works for most languages. Code extracts are shown for context when adding comments. If reviewing Java code, references to other classes within the file are clickable, so that you can drill into the detail if required. After review comments have been made, those comments can themselves be reviewed, and the required actions decided on and tracked
• Project owners. Review projects are easy to create and configure, and support (but don't require) integration with your source code management (SCM) system
• Process bigots. Details of all comments are held in the database, along with any actions required for each comment, and whether they've been completed. Status reports can be viewed at any time, and also show how much review activity took place on each file (to make sure they were all reviewed)
• Architects and developers. As well as viewing the comments made for a project, it's possible to see details of all review projects and comments for a specified file across all projects - good for finding code that would benefit from refactoring.

Glossary of Terms

The Glossary explains all the terms used in JCR.

Instructions for Use by Role

Use of JCR pretty much breaks down by role, as follows:

• The project owner creates and configures a review project, then makes it available for review by changing the project state to 'Reviewing files'. The owner is typically the poor bunny who wrote the code, and is now about to see it ripped to shreds before his very eyes. The owner can also assign a delegate, who can then also administer the project on behalf of the owner
• Each reviewer examines each of the files marked for review, optionally adding comments to any line of any file, or to the project as a whole. All comments are stored in the database, and are visible to (but not editable by) all reviewers
• When the review meeting is to be held, the project owner changes the status to 'Review meeting (surprisingly enough), and the owner and all the reviewers review the comments that were made. The actions required, and the person responsible for those actions, can be recorded
• The project owner changes the status to 'Post review', and those responsible for any corrective actions (usually the project owner) now do whatever work's required. Actions can be signed off, and explanatory notes can be added if required
• When actions are complete, the project owner changes the status to 'Complete', heaves an immense sigh of relief, and hopes it doesn't happen again soon.

Installation

FAQ

You can probably guess the contents of the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Other Information

Change log:

See the changes page for information on what was in each release (at least since 0.5.0)

Licence:

JCR is released under the GNU Public Licence. See the LICENCE file in the distribution

Things I've stolen from elsewhere:

I've learnt a lot through writing JCR, much of it from other open source projects on the web. I've also 'liberated' (you might prefer 'stolen') code and/or ideas from several projects or people.

This list probably isn't complete, but hopefully it'll serve to give credit where it's due.

• Frameworks and libraries:

  • Pylons - webapp framework
  • SQLAlchemy - object-relational mapping library
  • AuthKit - authentication middleware
  • JQuery - Javascript library
  • Pygments - syntax highlighting for source code
  • Pysvn - Subversion integration

• Codestriker:

  Codestriker gave me many of the original ideas for JCR. I also shamelessly stole much of the Codestriker CSS stylesheet to get started with JCR. Codestriker was the first indication I had that not all Perl code makes me want to throw up

• Audacity:

  The styles I used for tab pages come from the Audacity site

• Andrew Davidson:

  The animated icon indicating that file diffs are being generated. Released under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence

• Fedora Core:

  The little green tick used as the favicon.ico file for JCR was lifted from Fedora

• Wikipedia:

  The external indicator for links comes from Wikipedia. Given that those 100 pixels have probably been seen by everyone on the planet, I'm hoping Wikipedia won't miss one copy...

• Other icons:

  The up and down arrows I found on the web. If your graphics abilities matched mine, you'd know why...