For too long, code reviews have been too much of a chore. This is largely due to the lack of quality tools available, leaving developers to resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based solutions.

We've seen a lot of time and energy wasted doing code reviews both in open source projects and at VMware. In both cases, code reviews were typically done over e-mail. A significant amount of time was spent in forming review requests, switching between the diff and the e-mail, and trying to understand what parts of the code the reviewer was referring to.

In an effort to keep our sanity and improve the process both in our open source projects and at companies, we wrote Review Board.

Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.