I second Jesse Gibbs — although we’re both committed to companies with rival code review tools, we can agree that “code review is good,” and any kind of lightweight approach (even without a tool!) is better than nothing, and probably better than formal, lengthy meetings.

Thanks!

On the topic of lightweight vs. traditional code reviews, one of the most important differences is time commitment: Lightweight tool-assisted code reviews can be done asynchronously, which means less time in meetings and more time spent writing code. At Atlassian, our developers use Crucible to perform code reviews for a few minutes throughout the day, just like reading and responding to email. We rarely perform code review meetings, because the tool-based code reviews facilitate discussion and give us a historical archive of comments and changes made to the file.

For a lot of smaller teams working in a fast, iterative fashion, using a lightweight code review tool like Smart Bear, Crucible, ReviewBoard, etc. probably means the difference between having code review and not doing it at all.