_Crucible 101 Basics

Using Crucible is easy and lightweight, facilitating rapid and effective reviews. Jump right in and create your first review now .

There are many carry out reviews with Crucible. In some form or another you need to go through the following steps. Each step is linked to documentation, but you probably won't need it.

• Create the review - Select "Create Review" from the "Tools" menu in the top right of any page. 
• Add content to the review - Choose some stuff to review, either from a repository you have configured or by uploading something.
• Choose reviewers - if you haven't added users or [configured ldap] you won't be able to do this, you'll get a warning when you try to start the review, but you can ignore that
• Start the review - click the start button in the create dialog or in the top right hand corner of the review page
• Add some comments - use one of the many "add a comment" links or simply click on the lines of source your want to comment on
• Summarise and close the review - when you are finished with a review, it needs to be closed. Summarise is the state between "under review" and "closed", most of the time you will summarise and close at the same time. Alternatively you can abandon a review, which effectively moves it to the trash.

Now that you've got a feeling for the basic review concepts, its worthwhile taking a moment to customise your instance.

Pre commit
Crucible allows you to review a change before it has been committed. To do this, you upload a patch file to the 'Patch' tab (or paste it in as text) when creating a review. You must first generate this patch file from your repository, using either commands built into your IDE, or via the repository command-line tools.

• Create a new review. From the 'Tools' menu in Crucible, select 'Create Review'.
• Click 'Pre-Commit - Upload a patch file to be reviewed'. The 'patch upload' dialog appears. Click 'Browse', locate your file, then click 'Upload'. Crucible will now search for matches in the files in its database. Crucible will analyse all the paths in the patch, find the branches containing all those paths, then anchor the patch to the trunk or the branch with the most recent commit activity.

Learn more about pre-commit (patch) reviews here.

Post commit

• Create a new review. From the 'Tools' menu in Crucible, select 'Create Review'.
• To add files to a review, click the 'Files' option on the left navigation bar of the Manage Files dialog. The Files view opens.

Learn more about post commit reviews here.

• When adding reviewers, Crucible will suggest reviewers who have worked on the relevant files, but also don't have a big review backlog.
• You can set a specific due date for each review as you create them, or set a default duration for each review under a project.
• You can easily link to JIRA issues in reviews and associate reviews with JIRA issues.

• You can easily highlight defects in the code under review by click on the 'Defect' checkbox when commenting.
• All 'Defects' can be classified with a priority
• Crucible tracks the time you have spent on each file in a review and also your progress through the review.

Try hovering your mouse over the following links in Crucible to see the context windows:

• Crucible usernames,
• JIRA Issue Keys (when using JIRA; see the documentation).
• CSIDs (when using FishEye; see the documentation).

This information appears as a stream on the Dashboard and oher index pages, sorted chronologically showing you the latest changes. Updates can be viewed as an inline stream or RSS feed. See the documentation for more.

On the People index page, you can see the commit history in global lines of code (LOC) that each person has contributed (expressed as a line graph) and their total number of commits. Also, the most recent piece of activity is shown as a clickable item. See the documentation for more.

You can click on a person's name to see detailed information about their code reviews, showing details of their work and summaries of their activity. Additionally, you can see their work on tracked issues and additions to the repository if using Crucible with FishEye and JIRA integration is set up. See the documentation for more.

Click the 'Dashboard' tab to see a stream of all your own activity; your reviews; your personal code commits (if you are using FishEye); and your tracked issue updates (if you are using JIRA). See the documentation for more.

In Crucible, you can add the following items as favourites:

• Reviews,
• Review Comment Threads,
• Projects,
• People,
• Changesets,
• Files or Folders,
• Repositories.

Once items are added to your favourites, a list is created. You can then view it or see a stream of all activity relating to your favourites.

See the documentation for more.

• Configure your Email preferences.
• Check out the handy Blocker report and JIRA Blocker Reports. Every now and then, someone in the team can become a bottleneck in the review process. The review blocker reports help by identifying team members that have a lot of reviews waiting in their inbox.
• Configure your personal dashboard and set up RSS feeds.

Searching for Reviews:

• Using the Filters Navigation Bar
  • 'Everyone's Reviews' Filters
  • Custom Filters
  • Review State Filter
  • Comment Search

See the documentation for more.

Searching for comments:
Crucible give you the ability to search and filter review comments. Search or filter by comment content, defect classification, specific role(s), date and much more. Learn more here.

You can quickly find what you are looking for by typing one word or part of the name of what you are looking for. Crucible's Quick Nav feature will immediately show matches and suggestions below, before you've even pressed Enter or activated a proper search. Try typing a review's issue ID to go directly to that page.