Source Code Review – Gerrit

Code review is an important function in the software development framework. Having a good collaborative tool like Gerrit for a code review process is very appropriate and needed. Gerrit initiates a pull-based workflow to initiate change requests, wherein comments are included even for source code to allow the change to be merged into the code repository through the workflow process. Gerrit maintains a local repository of the mirrored Git project repositories with reference repositories. Gerrit creates another maintenance branch from master branch to track reviews to the code; it creates a change-id identifier for the commit message to keep track of each change in a code review.

Gerrit allows for code change comparisons and a reviewer can give one of five ratings:

• +2: Looks good, approved

• +1: Looks good, but needs additional approval

• 0: No comments

• -1: Suggest not submit this

• -2: Block the submit