What's New in Review Board

For years, companies have come to depend on Power Pack to track and report on the effectiveness of code review in their teams, to review code managed by GitHub Enterprise and Microsoft's Team Foundation Services, and to incorporate document review into their workflows.

Today, we're ready to announce the next generation of Power Pack. On the surface, this brings a number of substantial quality-of-life improvements to Reports and PDF Document Review and new support for AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server. Under the hood, we're in position to bring new collaboration features that we'll be announcing this year.

Let's dig in to what Power Pack 2.0 has to offer.

Revamped Reports

Generating reports for teams has never been easier. Our new UI lets you quickly locate the users and groups you want included in your report and to save those selections for future reports.

Choose a reporting period (such as "This quarter to date," "Last week," or "Since 1 year ago") to instantly see a new report for the period. Bookmark the weekly report in your browser to always keep track of how your team's doing this week.

Download a CSV file for any report to gain better insights using Excel or other tools.

A Polished PDF Experience

PDF document review has been completely redone to better fit in with the look and feel of Review Board 2.5 and 3.0, and to help you see more of your document at once.

Pop open the sidebar to see thumbnails for each page in the document. The active page you're reviewing will be highlighted so you always know where you are and how much you have left to read.

Navigation is smoother. Switching pages or zooming in or out of the document will keep your scroll position steady, so you don't lose your place.

Connect to AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server

With Power Pack, you can now review changes in your Git repositories hosted on AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server. Moving private repositories into CodeCommit or migrating from Bitbucket.org into an in-house Bitbucket Server no longer means changing code review tools.

Get Started

If you're new to Power Pack, why not give it a try? A 30 day free trial covers your whole server, and converts to a free 2-person license once expired. Ready to buy? A full license costs only $8.33 a user a month, for as many or as few users as you choose.

Existing user? Follow the simple upgrade instructions to begin using Power Pack 2.0 today.

Today's release of Review Board 3.0.3 focuses on a series of fixes and improvements for avatars, diffs for comments, extension packaging, and a few other things. The big highlights are with the new avatar upload UI and stability improvements.

Avatars

It's now easier to upload custom avatars. The UI has been completely redone, and gives you a better idea of how your avatar will look. Simply drag-and-drop any image to upload it.

We've also fixed a handful of problems with custom avatar backends, to prevent them from occasionally disappearing or not being used. If you're building custom backends, we're interested in hearing if you're encountering any problems with this release.

Some other things we've fixed

• The Review Request API resource now includes the number of issues pending verification.
• Diffs shown alongside comments work once again under Python 2.7.6 and older.
• Subversion support is no longer broken when using modern versions of Subvertpy.
• Extensions providing LessCSS stylesheets will now package correctly when including stylesheets outside the extension.

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

For over a decade, we've been building Review Board with the goal of making your code, UI, and documentation review process easier, helping you weigh in and spot problems before your customers do.

But we know you're busy — we all are — and there's better uses for your time than checking every change for syntax errors, unused variables, bad imports, style consistency, and other problems that could have been caught ahead of time by code analysis tools.

So we'd like to help you out.

Meet Review Bot.

Review Bot is a self-installed service and extension for Review Board 3.0 that automatically reviews code changes posted for review. It integrates with a handful of popular command line code analysis tools, gathering results and posting reviews for issues found in the code.

You can create as many Review Bot configurations as needed for your organization, running different tools for different repositories or review groups, and customizing the settings for each tool.

Review Bot 1.0 supports the following tools:

• BuildBot "try" — automated builds
• Checkstyle — Static analysis for Java
• Clang Static Analyzer — Static analysis for C, C++, and Objective-C
• Cppcheck — Static analysis for C and C++
• CppLint — Style checker for C and C++ using Google's style guide
• flake8 — Style checker and static analysis for Python
• JSHint — Static analysis for JavaScript
• PMD — Static analysis and duplicate code detector for a wide variety of languages
• pycodestyle — Style checker for Python
• pyflakes — Static analysis for Python

More are coming soon, but you're not limited to what Review Bot ships with. You can also write your own integrations for tools used in your organization using Python.

Get started with Review Bot

Review Bot is ready and eager to start reviewing your code today. To get set up, there are three components you'll need to install:

• A compatible message broker service, such as RabbitMQ or Redis, which tracks automated code review requests
• The Review Bot worker service, which runs any configured tools against your code
• The Review Bot extension for Review Board 3.0

The message broker and Review Bot worker can be installed on the server running Review Board or on a dedicated server. Follow your preferred broker's instructions and the Review Bot installation guide to get everything set up. Please note that some tools may have their own installation requirements as well.

If you have any questions or hit any problems as you get going, you can reach out to us on our community support forum. Priority support for Review Bot is also included as part of a Review Board support contract.