Understand and Improve Your Review Process

Understanding Your Code Reviews With Reports

Tracking Your Process with Key Metrics

Without metrics, it can be a tough to tell how effective your reviews actually are. Collaborator comes with 12 out-of-the-box reports so your team can quickly start identifying key metrics and setting benchmarks. In our 2020 State of Code Review report, we found that teams who regularly view reports on their process are 5X as likely to be satisfied with their code reviews. When you have metrics on your code review process, you can pull out insights and make improvements to how your team works. These are a few of the major report categories:

• Review Detail Reports
• Defect Reports
• User Reports

Review Detail Reports

In Review Detail Reports, you can see all of the metrics, defects, and comments associated with one specific review. These reports make it easy to maintain a complete record of reviews associated with specific changes. If you ever need to show your work or look back on why a decision was made, these reports make it easy to check.

Defect Reports

If you don’t know what kinds of mistakes your team is making, it is nearly impossible to prevent them in the future. With Defect Reports, your team can see information about defects across multiple reviews, including defect type and severity. If one type of defect is becoming prevalent in multiple reviews, your team might want to hold a training or make a process change. Defect Density is one metric in these reports that can be used to illustrate how many defects are being found over the number of Lines of Code Reviewed. This could be helpful in understand the efficacy of reviews, the difficulty of a project, or the progress of an engineer. Defect reports provide you with the information to make strategic decisions and understand potential skill gaps.

User Reports

When a teammate tells you that your code change “looks good”, how do you know that they actually spent the time to review your work? User Reports allow your team to view metrics like Inspection Rate, Lines of Code Reviewed, and Time Spent on Review. This information can help ensure that reviews are following common best practices and not being rushed.

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Customizing Code Review Reports to Match Your Goals

Your team likely has unique goals and challenges. Collaborator makes it easy to customize reports to be as relevant as possible. Columns and filters are added to reports by checking boxes, and any custom fields that your organization has configured can be included as well. By customizing reports, your team is able to expedite audit preparation, track key metrics over time, and see the impact of specific changes.

In this quick tutorial, we show what reports look like in Collaborator.