When working on this release of Review Assistant, we focused on improving the process of performing code review. We have addressed a number of issues with the product UI, changed the statuses of reviews, added categories for comments to code and completely reworked email notifications.
New statuses for review
We added the new Response Required status for a review. This status is for those cases when a reviewer cannot finish a review, because there are questions that the author of the code should answer before the review can be continued.
Besides, we renamed the Rejected status to Rework Needed, which describes the state of the code more precisely.
Automatic Review Status
Previously, a reviewer defined the status of a review manually. Now the reviewer simply clicks Complete Review, and the status of the review is determined automatically based on the type of comments specified.
Four categories of review comments
We’ve decided to expand the categories of comments to code. Now, in addition to a simple comment, you can add:
- a comment marked with Question. If you have such a comment, the review will get the status Response Required.
- a comment marked with Should Fix – indicates a deficiency in the code that is not critical.
- a comment marked with Must Fix – indicates an error in the code. Previously, such comments were marked with the Defect flag.
View changes in a single editor
Previously, when viewing changes to files, a separate document opened for each file. As a result, a reviewer had to close a lot of documents at the end of the review. Now a single diff-tool window opens, which alternately displays changes to different files.
New e-mail notifications
In this version, we completely reworked e-mail notifications. We changed the appearance of the letter, improved readability and added the missing information. In addition, now all the notifications on one review are combined into message chains.
Improved Code Review Board
- branches of code included in the review for Git & Mercurial are displayed on the board
- a reviewer now has the ability to view revisions included in a review
- unnecessary dialogs with warnings were removed
- improved work with comments
Other improvements
- improved export of reviews to XLS files
- improved verification of incompatibility between client and server versions
- MS SQL 2017 supported
- the database has been optimized, the total volume is reduced by 2 times
The single document “feature” is pretty terrible when you’re trying to get through an actually large number of files. Being able to open multiple files at one time is so much more efficient. Why would you take that away?
Hello, Ian. Thanks for your comment. We are planning to implement these feature in the next release. We will make an option to choose whether to open single and multiple documents.
Hello, Ian. The fix is available in version 4.1. You can download it by the following link: https://www.devart.com/review-assistant/download.html