How to use Crucible for initial or periodic reviews
We are currently trialling Crucible for use in combination with our existing JIRA installation and our Mercurial Server. Having tried it for a couple of days so far, we have been unable to actually create a meaningful review. We can review individual changesets, but this doesn't fit with our workflow and Crucible claims to be "Flexible". I've included a picture of our branching model at the bottom of this question.
We have tried to set up two types of review:
- An initial review: review the state of an entire project at a given revision (as opposed to the things that changed in that revision). Typically this will be the first revision in a branch called "codereview".
- A review comparing two specific revisions on the same branch. Typically these will be neighbouring commits to the "codereview" branch, but those commits will be merges combining a number of changesets into the "codereview" branch. Using crucible, these are shown as changesets in which nothing changes and hence there is nothing to review.
Point 1 in particular seems like a rather basic operation for a code review tool: surely in any project there's a bit of initial development to create the base project before it's reviewed. I don't want to review code that has been created when testing ideas and then deleted as no longer relevant. I can find no documentation on how to do this and have failed in any attempt to do so.
I've tried adding using "Browse Changesets", "Explore Repositories" and "Search for Files" (with every combination of options I can think of in both normal search and advanced search"). I also tried adding from the repository view, but got nowhere.
At the moment, I can't see how Crucible could possibly be useful for anything other than a web-development platform with a large team working on one product. We have a small team of about 20 engineers with each individual working on different products which are then reviewed at particular gateways by another engineer. We can't afford to have the other engineer reviewing every changeset regardless of whether it'll make it into the end product.
We're only two days into our 30-day trial of FishEye and Crucible, so I'm still holding out hope that we can manage to set up a review, but please can someone help with some basic instructions on how to do either (1) or (2) above?
A simplified drawing of our branching strategy. Note that between releases, there may be a large number of (unreviewed) changesets in default / feature branches between changes in the codereview branch.
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