Best Tools for Continuous Code Quality and Automated Code Review

With so many code review tools on the market, it's important that you choose the right tool for your project and its workflow. Here's a look at the best tools on the market to support continuous code quality and enable automated code review.

Continuous Code Quality Tools

Continuous code quality requires a development team to constantly scan code to identify issues. That's why automation and powerful tools go hand in hand with the continuous code quality (CCQ) approach. Here are some of the best.

Codacy

If you're looking for a highly organized tool to improve quality and reduce technical debt, you'll love Codacy's approach to grouping.

You can check your code across multiple categories, including complexity, compatibility, security, and style.

Pros

• Analyze pull requests and commit requests.
• Track problems across categories.
• Define goals at the file or category level.
• Codacy will offer suggestions to help you fix associated issues.

Cons

• No integrations with other SaaS platforms.
• Premium plans start at $15/month per user.
• Codacy has a relatively small community, which means little support if you opt for the free, open-source version.

Embold

Embold is an AI-assisted tool for testing code and identifying vulnerabilities, along with suggested solutions.

Pros

• Use Embold in the cloud or on-premises.
• Set quality thresholds for each repository.
• Get real-time feedback when you edit your codebase.
• The Score feature will grade overall code quality.
• Free for open-source use.

Cons

• Limited features, since it's a free tool.

Automated Code Review Tools

Automated code review tools will integrate into the development cycle, checking new code when it's merged into the codebase and alerting the team to potential performance issues.

Sonarcloud

If you're looking for a cloud-based service to monitor code quality and security, Sonarcloud offers one of the most robust code review tools. Sonarcloud can reveal any number of problems.

A long list of rules makes it even more efficient — for instance, it has 186 rules for JavaScript to check bugs, vulnerabilities, and more.

As part of each static code analysis, Sonarcloud will check for thousands of potential issues and examine test reports, which estimate code coverage.

Pros

• Blocks pull requests when it detects code violations.
• Sends analysis reports as a comment in a pull request.
• Will fail pipelines when your code doesn't hit your custom-set quality or security standards.
• Free and open-source.

Cons

• Doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but worth it as a free tool.

DeepSource

DeepSource helps you identify potential bugs, anti-patterns, and performance issues while also tracking dependency count and other important metrics.

All in all, you'll find that DeepSource identifies more issues than other code review tools. It also offers an excellent developer experience, allows you to ignore issues you don't want to fix, and even offers a 5 percent or less false-positives guarantee.

This makes DeepSource easily one of the most appealing options on the list.

Pros

• Integrate DeepSource with GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket.
• AutoFix feature suggests how to remedy identified issues.
• Helps you create pull requests for common problems.
• Free for open-source use.

Cons

• DeepSource doesn't support the PHP language.

Codebeat

With a 4.0 scale to rate your code, instead of the common A to F grades some other systems use, Codebeat sets the standard for simple and streamlined code review tools.

All results from your analysis will be compiled into a single, real-time report that gives you all the information you need to identify security and quality issues. This is a huge improvement over the clunky results and long reports some other tools produce.

With Codebeat, you'll be encouraged to thoroughly review all results, every time, which in itself contributes to better code. Plus, you can use Codebeat to help manage the dev team, which is an added perk if you like having everything in one place.

Pros

• Permissions and access levels to protect your projects.
• Assign people to different projects to keep everyone on track.
• Use it to manage your dev team with ease.
• Integrates with popular tools, including GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Slack.
• Free for public repositories.

Cons

• Private repositories start at $20/month.
• Small teams might find that the dev team management tools get in the way.

Code Climate

Code Climate handles both code coverage and automated code review. It conveniently integrates with GitHub and other platforms, and it's a popular solution for continuous integration (CI) practices.

With Code Climate, you can check factors like style, complexity, and duplication and get a maintainability grade from A to F.

Pros

• Test coverage for every pull request.
• Integrations to run analysis locally as part of your CLI or IDE initiatives.
• Receive scores from A to F that evaluate various factors.
• Free for up to 10 users.

Cons

• Lack of support for Objective-C.
• Lack of detailed descriptions for the issues it identifies.
• Can't search or filter issues; all results are paginated.

CodePeer

If you need a code review tool for Ada or Java, CodePeer might be the right solution.

It works on both Linux and Windows platforms, and you can implement it for both unit testing and integration testing.

Pros

• Checks for suspicious code.
• Analyzes every line in your codebase.
• Reveals bugs, vulnerabilities, and redundancy.

Cons

• The high price quickly adds up.
• Doesn't support many languages.

Conclusion

Understanding the importance of your quality code and the benefits of automating the process of reviewing code with the best tools that fit your project sets you on the path to success.

Adservio can help you pursue continuous quality code in an efficient and affordable manner.

Contact our team of professionals for more information on how can you benefit from implementing the right review tools and principles for achieving excellence.