Todd

Hi, it's Todd here, and I'm joined by Alen. Today we're going to look at a painful but important and sometimes mandatory part of the software development process. That is the code review. Specifically, we're going to look at Klocwork's offering called, Klocwork Inspect. Alen, can you give us a brief overview of Klocwork Inspect?

Alen

Yes, basically, it's a web-based tool that provides a lightweight way for developers to do collaborative code reviews. What we're looking at here is the main feed page, modeled after your Facebook wall or your Twitter feed. It really gives a developer a non-intrusive way to do code reviews.

Todd

Okay. So similar to my Facebook wall or Twitter feed, I follow what I want, and I get notified when updates occur.

Alen

Right. You'd want to do just the same here with Klocwork Inspect. You just click the Create a New Feed. It gives you the option to create a feed name. This is just what you want to see or who you want to follow. So I would say, "Okay, there are specific users I want to follow. I'm going to follow you, Todd." Then you can add any components, as well, as part of your project. So if there are some certain third-party components that you're concerned about or certain implementations in the source code, you just add them here, and it creates that feed accordingly. You get the updates through an RSS feed that would come through either your email or your RSS reader if you so choose.

Todd

Okay. You're already in Klocwork Inspect here. But if we were to take this back a step, when you actually get started with a code review, developers would simply launch it from their IDE.

Alen

Yeah. You can either launch it through your IDE. That means, while you're making changes to your code, you just simply say, "Create a code review." Another option for those who don't have or are not working in IDE, there's obviously a command line way to do this as well. These are all great for what we call pre-checkin. That means before you check in your code, you want to go through a code review. But there's also the other way of doing code reviews, as well, by running another tool through Klocwork. It's called our KWSCM tool, and that basically uses integration through your source configuration manager so that you can do post-checkin. That essentially means pulling in all the code as part of a code review and populating that into the feed.

Todd

What do you do to actually perform a code review?

Alen

It's pretty simple. Any type of code review I want to look at, I just click through. So in my case here, there is a specific code review with a number of changes already. I'm going to jump into this one particular Java file that we're looking at here. You'll notice any changes are highlighted here on the right bug marker. So you can see here anything in green is brand new code, whereas anything that's red is something that's changed from the left side to the right side. We're just looking at a diff that's a split view. You can look at a merged view. There are a lot of different ways to look at what you want.

Now, the great thing about this is, at any point, you can add a comment. A comment is just saying this looks good or it doesn't look good, if you so choose. Or something that is similar is an action. This is really kind of a to-do item, something that you need to address or you want to identify as a bug. You can say, for example here, "Don't know. We need to add a new name." Then you just assign any particular person. In this case, I'm going to assign you, Todd, to this particular action.

Todd

Okay. Now these are going to show up on my feed page?

Alen

Yes, that's exactly it. First, you will see it highlight inside your diff view. Then if you go right back to your feed, any new comments, like the one I just created here, it's right at the top of your feed. Again, just that same social media feel that you always get. One of the great things about this though as well, and I should mention, is there is also an integration with stack analysis. This has the really great benefit of being able to drill down into any code review and then be able to say, "Okay, show me the details of any the defects," whether I'm looking in the diff view, so any defects will be shown in the dif view, or jumping into the list of the defects, like it just did here to see all the detailed information, like the trace information, the description, and even change the status of that particular bug. So it's an extra granularity that you get to review certain types of bugs as well during your code review.

Todd

All right. So just to wrap up what we've seen here today, Klocwork Inspect provides a number of important benefits. The first is that flexible usability model, the lightweight approach to doing code reviews. Secondly, there's the static analysis defect, which you just mentioned, that are integrated right into the diff view. Then thirdly, because of the collaborative nature of the tool, users are just more engaged in the code review process, so that there are just inherent productivity improvements. Thanks so much for the demo, Alen.

Alen

You're welcome.

Todd

For more information, check out our website at www.Klocwork.com/documentation.