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how to add comments into source code during code review


Lai Bao Liu (334) | asked Jul 16 '12, 11:01 p.m.
retagged Oct 06 '17, 3:55 p.m. by Ken Tessier (84117)

I would like to know how to add comments into source code during code review? Any good ways?


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Juan Pablo Bruno commented Feb 27 '13, 8:16 a.m. | edited Feb 27 '13, 9:35 a.m.

Is there any plan from the RTC development team to provide better mechanism for code inspection? Something that works like ReviewBoard will be a WOW factor I guess since you not only can make comments to the line of codes you're reviewing and it´s easy to do follow up once the comments are resolved.
Thus, the flow for a code inspection is quite simple.

Thanks


Tim Mok commented Feb 27 '13, 9:40 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

There have been some work items opened recently related to ReviewBoard integration. They haven't been planned. You can search the RTC project area to see the work items. Also, go through your support channels so that this kind of integration can be prioritized for future releases.

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David Lafreniere (4.8k7) | answered Oct 04 '17, 8:29 p.m.
FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
edited Oct 05 '17, 10:42 a.m.

It sounds like the RTC Code Review feature would meet your needs....


In Rational Team Concert 6.0.1 we have introduced a new Code Review feature. Code review is integrated with RTC work items and Jazz SCM to provide developers with a seamless, low overhead work flow that is simple to use and is a natural extension to their daily activities. There isn’t a separate server installation, additional licensing fees or other costs associated with using RTC code review. Enabling code review for your projects is simple and takes only a few minutes to set up.

Reviewers can annotate specific lines of code, which helps developers quickly see and fix issues. Issues (or findings) can be marked as must-fix and the reviewer can accept or reject the changes. When preconditions are enabled, a code review cannot be approved if must-fix issues have not been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

Developers don’t have to worry about the intricacies of issue management because this is handled for them. Each issue has its own discussion thread and events are logged as the review progresses. Whenever an issue is updated, a new issue raised, or new code changes are added to the review, the events are logged so that you have a complete history of the review life-cycle. Because code reviews are iterative and can include code changes during the review cycle, any annotations on lines of code (issue markers) are automatically re-positioned and visual cues are provided to the reviewer so that they can easily see what has changed since they last looked at the code or since they last reviewed issues.

Team collaboration is accelerated through real-time notification of pending reviews, issues, and fixes. This is becoming more and more important as the number of globally distributed development teams increase. In fact, with the RTC SCM development team spread across three different time zones, it is common for them to have code changes that were written in one time zone reviewed by team members in another time zone.

Code review enables auditing for compliance. Issue status at delivery, approval information, the event logs, and other information captured during the review can be used for a variety of metrics and reporting requirements.

Since the introduction of code review in 6.0.1 more features have been added. Reviewers can inspect intermediate before and after file states, which is useful in advanced SCM workflows encountered when multiple developers are working on a common code base. We have added the ability to filter issues on the navigator pane on the left, add tags to issues, and various usability enhancements have been added.

The ability to extract work items is useful when an issue needs to be addressed but shouldn’t prevent delivery of the current code changes. The extracted work item captures the required work and will have its own code review cycle.

A SCM CLI command is also available to export code review data such as issues raised, issue activity, reviewer information, code delivery status, and other metrics in JSON or XML format. This enables customers to use their existing reporting tools or custom scripts for auditability and other reporting requirements

Additional Information:
Article: Rational Team Concert Code Review
Video: Introduction to Code Review (Part 1)
Video: Configuring Code Review (Part 2)
Video: Performing a Code Review (Part 3)
Knowledge Center: Working With the Code Review Tool

Michael Valenta selected this answer as the correct answer

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David Olsen (5237) | answered Jul 17 '12, 12:04 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
RTC doesn't provide a way to insert comments directly into the code.  You could create a new change set that contains your comments in the code, but it is not clear to me what you would do with that change set.

The teams that I have worked with that have used RTC and have done code reviews have just added the comments to the associated work item, not to the code itself.  I have found that to work well enough in most cases.

Comments
Lai Bao Liu commented Jul 17 '12, 4:05 a.m.

Actually, we want to insert comments to source code just like CCRT tool, I don't know if you know this tool. Does your team have the plan to support this function for RTC?


Tim Mok commented Jul 17 '12, 11:08 a.m. | edited Oct 04 '17, 8:27 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

I'm not familiar with the CCRT tool but David's suggestion of adding comments in a new change set would work. The reviewer would need to have the code loaded and accept the change sets before adding the comments. You'll have to work out what to do with those comment change sets. You can deliver them or discard them before building any other changes on top.

SmartBear also provides integration with RTC for a code review tool. https://jazz.net/extend/integrations/#tool=Smartbear%20Code%20Collaborator

I've never used that tool before so I don't know what the code review work flow is like using that tool.

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