Code reviews are used in the industry to increase quality of submitted code. Different tools are used to enable the four general review strategies; pre-commit reviews, pull requests (merge requests in Gitlab), post-commit reviews, and Gerrit reviews. Code development specifics can favour one of the strategies, usually pull (or merge) requests. In academia the needs and goals can be very different. Code reviews are rarely used, for a variety of reasons. Code development and workflows are highly dependent on academics’ varying software engineering capacity. RSEs assisting development through code reviews will find that industry practices don’t always apply. Large, established codebases, developed by more than one person over a long period of time, inconsistent coding practices and no testing, can be very difficult to handle. Moreover, their commit history is usually linear and/or not useful. Post-commit reviews are alternatives to pull requests, and this overview of code review tools explores how they can be combined and used in research software development environments.
