what’s new review assistant

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.

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Summary: In Review Assistant 2.0 we have modified the simple review workflow. Now it is possible to add a code-related comment and accept author’s changes, and at the same time leave the review open.

This is the fifth article in the series of What’s New in Review Assistant 2.0

How does simple review workflow work?

There are three review roles by default:

• Author — the person who creates code.
• Reviewer — the person who inspects code.
• Moderator — the person who double checks a review and settles disputes.

Here is how it looks like in the application:

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Summary: This article describes improvements we have introduced into the iterative code review process — the distinctive Review Assistant feature.

This is the fourth article in the series of What’s New in Review Assistant 2.0

What is iterative code review?

Iterative code review refers to the situation when a single piece of work is reviewed more than once by the same reviewer.
In fact this is a regular case. None of major changes in code will pass without reviewers comments. They find bugs and faults which an author should fix, and then show the code over again.
The Review Assistant documentation contains more detailed description of the iterative code review.
Not all code review tools support repetitive code inspections within a single review. Review Assistant has been providing this feature since the first release. In Review Assistant 2.0 we have significantly improved this process.
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Summary: This article describes new Review Assistant features, namely: the possibility to work with several repositories within a single review, and also the possibility to add nested repositories into a project.

This is the third article in the series of What’s New in Review Assistant 2.0

While working on a large scale projects it is not uncommon that the source code is stored in more than one repositories. Devart’s own projects are not an exception.

From the very first release of Review Assistant there was the possibility to associate several repositories with a single project. However, while creating a new review there was only the possibility to add files from one repository.
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Summary: One of our main missions, while working on the new version of Review Assistant was to improve user experience in general. This article describes how we have solved some UX problems related to the commenting on code.

This is the second article in a series of What’s New in Review Assistant 2.0
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Summary: In Review Assistant v2.0 we have completely redesigned the Code Review Board window. We have made efforts to make performance more straightforward, and to make the application UI more natural for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

This is the first article in a series of What’s New in Review Assistant 2.0

While working on the new version of Review Assistant, we studied UX problems detected earlier. Solutions for many of these problems required application’s interface changes. We had started development of Review Assistant v 1.0 long before Visual Studio 2012 was released. That’s why the UI was more suitable for Visual Studio 2010. To go with the times we have decided to redesign the main window — Code Review Board.

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We have started developing the new version of Review Assistant – code review tool for Visual Studio. Help us to make up the new version by filling in a 10-minute survey on code review.

We are glad to inform our users that we’ve started the development of the new version of our product for code review automation.

It’s been awhile after the first release of Review Assistant, so we have come to certain conclusions. On the whole, we should say that the product was accepted by the users with interest. Certainly, it’s been mentioned time and again that Review Assistant is a young product and needs improvement.
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