Discussion about Git Code Collaboration Tool (Gerrit)?

Question

What is Gerrit?

Gerrit is a free, web-based team code collaboration tool. Software developers in a team can review each other's modifications on their source code using a Web browser and approve or reject those changes. 

It integrates closely with Git, a distributed version control system.

Gerrit is a fork of Rietveld, another code review tool. Both namesakes are of Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld.
Code reviews mean different things to different people. To some it’s a formal meeting with a projector and an entire team going through the code line by line. To others it’s getting someone to glance over the code before it is committed.

Gerrit is intended to provide a lightweight framework for reviewing every commit before it is accepted into the code base. Changes are uploaded to Gerrit but don’t actually become a part of the project until they’ve been reviewed and accepted. 

In many ways this is simply tooling to support the standard open source process of submitting patches which are then reviewed by the project members before being applied to the code base. However Gerrit goes a step further making it simple for all committers on a project to ensure that changes are checked over before they’re actually applied. Because of this Gerrit is equally useful where all users are trusted committers such as may be the case with closed-source commercial development. 

Either way it’s still desirable to have code reviewed to improve the quality and maintainability of the code. After all, if only one person has seen the code it may be a little difficult to maintain when that person leaves.

Gerrit is firstly a staging area where changes can be checked over before becoming a part of the code base. It is also an enabler for this review process, capturing notes and comments about the changes to enable discussion of the change. 

This is particularly useful with distributed teams where this conversation can’t happen face to face. Even with a co-located team having a review tool as an option is beneficial because reviews can be done at a time that is convenient for the reviewer. 

This allows the developer to create the review and explain the change while it is fresh in their mind. Without such a tool they either need to interrupt someone to review the code or switch context to explain the change when they’ve already moved on to the next task.

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