Review Assistant is a code review tool. Our code review plugin helps you to create review requests and respond to them without leaving Visual Studio. Review Assistant supports Azure DevOps, TFS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, and Perforce. Simple setup: up and running in 5 minutes.
Review Assistant is free of charge for 1 project with up to 3 participants.
To learn more about pricing options for a bigger team, please visit ordering page.
Review Assistant Features
Code discussion
- Add your comments at the review level, or specific source code blocks or lines.
- Initiate code discussions with your team members without scheduled meetings.
- Mark comments and defects that need to be fixed.
- Review comments displayed in the code editor.
- Instant switching between review comments and the code.
More flexible email notifications
- Individual settings of email notifications for each event type.
- Every member of a project can now receive email notifications about all events in reviews.
Multiple review iterations
Typical code review consists of multiple review-fix cycles. Review Assistant is designed to support these iterations:
- Developer can add revisions to an existing code review.
- Reviewer can see what's changed since the last review.
- Reviewer can pick what changes to view when comparing file revisions.
New role in a review - Watcher
- A review creator can assign team members to monitor the review process (make them watchers).
- Watchers receive all review notifications as if they were review participants.
- Watchers can join a review any time if they want to add comments to code.
Rich integration features
The following version control systems are supported:
- Team Foundation Server (TFS).
- Azure DevOps.
- Subversion (SVN).
- Git.
- Mercurial (Hg).
- Perforce.
Discussions in code
Code reviews are about improving your code base. Comments and discussions within your team are the heart of the process. Review Assistant supports threaded comments, so team members can discuss code without scheduled meetings.
- Add comments on specific source lines, blocks of code, files, or the entire review.
- Various types of comments to clearly explain a problem to be solved.
- Provide comments on binary files, such as images.
- Start discussions in code, without creating a formal code review.
- Unread comments and replies are highlighted.
Create reviews without specifying reviewers
This feature was added for agile teams. It allows creating "hanging" reviews, which any team member can pick up.
- Code author can now create a review without adding specific reviewers.
- All project members receive an email notification about a new review.
- Reviews with no reviewers appear under My Reviews and To Review filters for every project member.
- Any project member can join a review.
Iterative review with defect fixing
Review Assistant supports multiple comment-fix-verify cycles in one review.
- Author can instantly see open comments in the code editor.
- Comment statuses are color-coded.
- Author can restart a review by adding revisions with fixes.
- A reviewer can see exact changes made by an author according to comments.
- Iterative review for pre-commit.
More useful features
- Auto-detection of renamed/moved files.
- Using a single diff-tool window for comparison.
- Two modes of opening a work item.
Reporting and Statistics
Review Assistant collects basic code review metrics automatically. It provides the following reports:
Authors Statistics
Code Coverage
Code Review Details
Reviewers statistics
Reviews Status
Users Status
Drop-in Replacement for Visual Studio Code Review Feature
Review Assistant is a descent alternative to Visual Studio Code Review feature:
- Review Assistant works on the Professional edition. No need to upgrade to Visual Studio Premium.
- Supports reviewing multiple changesets at a time.
- Iterative review support.
- Check-in policy for pre-commit code review.
- Review moderator support.
