Gerrit: Google-style code review meets git

“HTC, Qualcomm, TI, Sony Ericsson, and Android originator Google
are all running Gerrit, project leader Shawn Pearce said in a talk
at the October 2009 GitTogether event, hosted at Google in Mountain
View.

“The Gerrit story starts with the progressive escape of an
in-house Google process and tool. Google requires code review for
any change to company code or configuration files; there are a few
exceptions, but those are subject to review after deployment. The
code review process started out using lots of email, but for the
past several years it has been automated. When Guido van Rossum,
creator of the Python language, began working at Google in 2005, he
started developing a tool, in Python naturally, to coordinate code
reviews. The result, called Mondrian, lets users view the proposed
change as a side-by-side comparison, and participate in comment
threads attached anywhere in the code under review. An overview
page shows a to-do list of incoming changes to review and
reviewers’ comments. Van Rossum presented Mondrian at a public talk
in 2006. (video).

“Mondrian has been a huge success inside Google, Pearce said.
“Almost every engineer uses this as their daily thing.” But
Mondrian is heavily dependent on Google’s internal infrastructure,
including the in-house Bigtable non-relational table store and the
proprietary Perforce revision control system. Google is a huge
Perforce shop, and has built its own highly-customized IT
infrastructure, including Perforce-dependent tools.”

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