RealtyNinja revamped their code reviews with Beanstalk

RealtyNinja helps busy real estate agents create awesome websites. They do the heavy technical lifting for their customers, so it’s really important for their team to squash bugs and keep rolling out smaller features while they continue to work on major releases and refactor key components of their overall code infrastructure.

Pushing quality code saves RealtyNinja, and their customers, time and money. Until recently, code review on their team has traditionally been pieced together. In the words of Casimir Loeber, Co-Founder of RealtyNinja, We conducted code reviews in a haphazard sort of way. Mainly, we would do one before we merged anything into master and before we pushed code to our live server. We would use a random mix of tools to compare code, from compare tools in Beanstalk to command line git diff tools. It was not a systematic process because there was no structure around the tools or methods that we were using.

By having a streamlined tool that we can use to perform code reviews, it has given us the structure we need to be able to integrate code reviews into our development flow.

Part of the problem for RealtyNinja, and many other teams, is the code review software they tried in the past was designed with an all or nothing approach. It forced them to adapt to the code review software workflow, rather than allowing them to adapt a code review process to fit how they already work. Because of this Casimir was a bit skeptical when Beanstalk approached RealtyNinja and asked them to try the code review beta, Lots of tools out there try to force their vision of how we should be doing something down our throats, which results in us not using them at all.

Earlier this year RealtyNinja started using code review in Beanstalk and it changed the way their team reviews their code. It didn’t introduce a complex new workflow for everyone to learn and remember. Instead, it allows them to adapt the software to fit how their team works. It’s code review on their terms. Casimir put it like this, By having a streamlined tool that we can use to perform code reviews, it has given us the structure we need to be able to integrate code reviews into our development flow.

RealtyNinja is able to use Code Review from Beanstalk to collaborate on bigger projects while continuing to work through smaller updates. We can work on low-level refactors of major pieces of our application while still deploying bug fixes and smaller features to our clients, Casimir said, Of course this has always been possible but has been made incredibly simple, with much less room for error, by having such a solid code review tool available to us.

November 5th, 2014