Source code review

Atollic TrueSTUDIO® is the first embedded systems development tool to integrate features for source code review and conducting code review meetings. Performing source code reviews are by many considered to be the cheapest and fastest way to improve software quality the most.

A team leader or another member of the team can easily create a review session, and make some basic configurations like what files to review, specify the list of reviewers etc.

All reviewers can then use the integrated review features in the Atollic TrueSTUDIO source code editor to easily add code review comments to any source code line, along with information on severity and category (logic error, coding standards violation, optimization, portability problem, etc). All source code lines with a code review comment from any of the developers are flagged with a marker in the editor.

Atollic TrueSTUDIO list all review comments in the project, which is ideal for code review meetings. Clicking on a code review comment in the list immediately opens the corresponding code location in the editor. A review comment editor is provided as well.

Developers can thus sit down together (for example using an LCD projector in the team meeting room) and go through all review comments, and discuss if a specific review comment should be fixed or not, and optionally assign it to a team member for implementation. Once flagged as completed by the assigned team member, the code review comment is removed from the code review task list.

Performing code reviews is one of the best ways of improving software quality, and is routine when developing safety-critical software, like flight-control-systems.

For more information, read our white paper:

Improving embedded software quality with source code reviews