A Collaborative Code Review Platform for GitHub

The incorporation of peer code reviews as being part of a developer's work flow, and hence the software development lifecycle, has steadily grown in popularity over the past three decades. During the process of statically inspecting code, developers of a codebase are able to collaboratively detect possible code defects, as well as use code reviews as a means of transferring knowledge to improve the overall understanding of a system. The uptake of such practices is dependent on several factors, specifically the availability of tools that aid in providing an easy-to-use and intuitive platform to perform code reviews, and is readily accessible to members of a project. This paper briefly explores the act of code review, identifies the pitfalls of existing code review tools, and proposes the design and development of a web-based code review application, along with the evaluation of the prototype. The code review tool developed, Fistbump, targets the popular Git based repository hosting service, GitHub, and provides a versatile tool to coordinate and manage discussions between the owner of a pull request and the elected participants of a review.