Critique this idea: Code Review as a service
$49 / $99 / $159, Project Level Code Reviews for Applications
Will Follow a documented review process, that will be up for display on the site, for aspects we look for. (efficiency, safer functions, finding potential bugs... etc)
Reviewers have years of experience in web app development, right now I'm focusing on just Javascript-based application (React, Node, Angular, etc).
As in code review fashion, we assume the Application works.
Things I need help thinking about:
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What is the best way of receiving code from customers?
I'm thinking of uniformity and telling customers to just send over a copy of the code through a dropbox link. rather than some customers having vastly different repos... then again we can always adapt for for certain circumstances. -
Security and worry
I'm sure people will be uneasy giving code to some random company. Any ideas of quenching those fears?
I can get a landing page and everything set up in 2 days.
What do you all think of the idea? criticisms, questions, improvements are welcome.
I'm an engineer working full time in a start-up and an indie hacker on evenings and weekends. Things that come to mind -
All my own opinion of course (maybe it's more relevant for less experienced devs), best of luck with it!
Not that it’s a bad idea, but look at pullrequest.com. They’d been trying to sell to my company a similar service.
I would go more for mentoring the team that is developing and bring all those quality practices, selling my service as this, otherwise will be painful for someone who don't know the core business doing code review, even this should be like a practice and a manifest that all team should agree on it and decisions should be made about what to follow. So, i think it makes more sense sell a team that will bring know-how, practices and mentoring to my team to learn how to do a good quality code process.. Best luck!
Would you review the entire repo? Or be a code reviewer on a PR? Either way, the only way I can imagine wanting to use this is via GitHub's interface, and I bet you can only support GitHub for a loooong time (and maybe BitBucket?) before running out of customers. Managing a Dropbox with my code sounds like a pretty annoying hurdle.
And yeah, some sort of NDA would be required for me to be ok handing over my code. And even then, it'd be a hard sell at any company I've worked at previously.
I was thinking about this exact thing earlier today! I'm more of a coding hobbyist than dev. Have done some side projects at work (I'm an IT network guy). Now I'm trying to build a saas app and learn a framework at the same time. My code is functional; but if a real dev looked at it, they'd probably puke in disgust. Therefore I'd consider using a service like this.
Security and going past non-disclosure is going to be a hard one. As uniformity... maybe consider start by supporting a hosted repo like GitHub/GitLab and using one of the existing code review tools. Just to validate the idea without building a whole lot. A idea for marketing the concept would be to provide free code reviews for existing open source JS projects, and that will get your name out there.
Also be aware that organizations that value code review, already probably have a process for it. And ones that don't might not value it or could afford it.
RE: Security and worry
Definitely get some legal documents done to protect the customer, some sort of agreement where an NDA goes in effect when the code is delivered. Just to set the mind at ease.