Customer use case: PullReview.com

SaaS providers are often challenged with the task of serving two completely different markets, both operated by the exact same people.

In the case of PullReview, they are Ruby, Rails (and soon JavaScript) developers working in Enterprises and Startups alike.

What is PullReview?

PullReview helps developers and teams with shipping good code, on time.

Their web service automatically reviews, tests, analyzes, verifies and comments on your code on every push.

It makes it extremely easy to detect security vulnerabilities, bad code, duplication, lack of tests, and other important aspects of shipping quality code.

PullReview features overview

• PullReview reviews only your changes in a feature branch. For the integration branch, it reviews the whole code base.

• Based on the issues it found, PullReview reports you a list of prioritized and actionable improvements with all the information you need: in which file, class, or method does the issue occur? what’s the code context? why is it an issue? how could I fix it?

• PullReview tracks your progress on a feature branch and can detect when you have fixed an issue.

• PullReview supports your TDD by reviewing your test coverage report and warning you which method or class you just modified is not covered by a test.
  
  

  

• With the correct permission, you can setup PullReview in less than 5 minutes.

• PullReview can read source code hosted on GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab (self-hosted or not)

• PullReview notifies you via email, chat (HipChat, Slack and Flowdock are coming soon), GitHub status, PullRequest commented with a badge

• For teams that cannot let their code stored outside their datacenter, PullReview is also available as an on-premise software.

PullReview on-premises

The team at 8th Color (PullReview creators) approached us earlier this year because they had a problem: many of their customers, who also happen to be GitHub Enterprise customers, wanted to use PullReview, within their own corporate network.

We offered to help them build an initial virtual appliance using Jidoteki and our favorite configuration management tool.

After building, provisioning and testing over 30 virtual appliances, we finally had an appliance that was ready to ship to customers.

It took a bit longer than expected, but it allowed us to fix some important issues in Jidoteki and create some great open source scripts for our future customers.

Difference between SaaS and On-Premises

You get the same version of PullReview in both instances. With the on-premises solution, you get the upgrades with some delay, but you’ll have the same features on both, except for the integration with certain third-party tools.

Key information

• Payment model: annual subscription license
• Format: .OVF file
• Platform support: VirtualBox, VMWare
• Source code: closed source, protected by EULA
• Control panel: not yet
• Update process: upload a package file via SSH
• Security: only accessible internally over HTTPS
• URL: https://pullreview.com/

Final thoughts

We currently use PullReview for some Open Source code we’ve written, and we plan to use it internally for some of our Ruby code.

At the moment we’re still a small team so it’s difficult for us to take the time to try and integrate many new tools into our workflow, but for larger teams we believe the time is worth the effort, and positive results will show right away.