Code Reviews in Your IDE: A Strong “Thumbs Up”

This week CodeStream conducted a survey among select users to get their perspective on the value of conducting code reviews in their IDE instead of their current process, which takes place in a web browser, away from the place where code is actually written.

This survey is a continuation of the 33 customer interviews we conducted on this and other topics over the course of the past month. We were interested in learning more about their use of pull requests in the context of code discussion and code reviews. 30 of the 33 customers used GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket for their code reviews. Three used a special-purpose tool, such as Phabricator. Given the preponderance of Git-based code reviews which take place in a web browser, away from the editor and all the context that makes understanding code faster and easier, we wanted to know if our customers would welcome a different approach: initiating and conducting code reviews entirely in the IDE. 148 developers participated. These are the results of the short survey:

Clearly, there is a strong appeal to trying an IDE-based code review tool. Not surprisingly, since CodeStream is designed as an IDE extension to provide this kind of functionality, we are working on such an approach.

While conducting a code review in your IDE is desirable, most of our customers want to make sure that the output (comments, CI/CD, etc.) connects to a pull request in ways that extend the workflow rather than replace it. That is consistent with the feedback we had received during the interviews mentioned above. This will inform our planning.

We are also encouraged by the level of interest in looking at our code review work-in-progress feature set. We have been conducting preview sessions for the past couple of weeks, and we are now actively recruiting customers who would like to take our new features for a spin (in private beta) and give us feedback. If you are interested in participating, let us know at team@codestream.com or on Twitter @teamcodestream.

Originally published at https://www.codestream.com.