Mylyn Reviews with Gerrit, Top Eclipse Kepler Feature #8

As we move closer to another Eclipse Release, I’m counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Kepler Features that I’m most excited about. Number 8 on my list is Mylyn Reviews with Gerrit integration.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, Gerrit is a code review system designed for use with the Git version control system. It’s a highly configurable, web-based, code review system. Gerrit is used by Eclipse, LibreOffice, Qt, Android and many more.

To use Gerrit, developers push their patches directly to the code review system. Triggers such as automated builds and test suites can be invoked, automatically rejecting any patches that fail to pass these basic checks. Reviewers can then examine the patch, comment on it, iterate over it, and ultimately accept or reject it. Once a patch has met all the review criteria, Gerrit will automatically merge it into the desired branch.

While Gerrit does provide a powerful web-based UI for reviewing changes, the workflow pulls the developer away from their IDE. Mylyn Reviews changes this by bringing the Gerrit Code Review into Eclipse.

With the Gerrit integration & Mylyn Reviews, you can setup watch lists to see incoming reviews.

You can see the changes introduced by the Patch in a side-by-side compare view.

You can also comment directly on changes and share them with the WebUI.

Finally, once the patch is suitable for inclusion, you can verify it, and merge it with the desired branch.

Finally, the EGit team provides actions to push changes directly to Gerrit for review.

If you haven’t been using code reviews because the technology was too complicated, or didn’t integrate with your existing tools, you can no longer use that as an excuse :-).

Follow me on Twitter as I count down to Kepler.