If you are working on good development project with a team which you would like to support and maintain over a long period of time then code review is utmost important. No matter how good is your team, code review is required because of various factors.

As you all know, Great Developers is involved in developing SaaS products. We already have some products live and there are many in the queue to be launched. To give our clients the best experience in using these products, we have to ensure that the systems are bug free, fast and reliable. To achieve this we need to do rigorous testing and code review.

Until now, code review was a challenge for me. While browsing or updating the code, even if I found some issues in the code, I used to kinda ignore it. There are various reasons I avoided that for:

• Taking screenshots
• Highlighting the code, specifying the issue
• Emailing the screenshot with the details of lines, projects, file names, etc
• Following up on the closure, etc

These issues led me to look for a better solution of code review. I started searching and came across couple of tools, one of which is Review Assistant from Devart.
Review Assistant is a Lightweight peer code review tool, add-in for Visual Studio. Automated code inspection handled by code review tools helps to improve coding quality, hone developers’ skills, and ship software with less defects. Review Assistant helps you to benefit from code review with minimum overhead. Whether you employ formal or lightweight review workflows, you will find this Visual Studio add-in most useful for the development workflow.

Below is the list of features, why you would like to use Review Assistant

• Integration into Visual Studio
• Simple Review Process
• Integration with SVN, GIT, TFS
• Code discussions
• Formal Reviews
• Ad-hoc reviews
• Integration with Code Comparison tools
• Last, but not the least – It’s free *

Take your code review routine with you into your favorite IDE. Review Assistant comes as an add-in for Visual Studio 2010/2012, which allows you to:

• Forget about switching between two different tools during code revision
• Inspect peers’ work and provide annotations within the project context, for a simpler revision procedure
• See other reviewers’ comments directly in the development environment

Review Assistant provides a simple, lightweight process for post-commit code reviews:

• No need to call a review meeting
• Easy to set up and start using the code review tool straight away
• Streamlined workflows allow doing your own jobs while reviewing your colleagues’ work
• Most features are optional, allowing you to apply flexible workflow settings to take up with the code inspection schemes adopted in your company

Free Edition

You can enjoy the benefits of the code inspection tool without paying for it. Start using the tool for free now. During the trail period, you use the full functionality. After the trail period, you’ll be restricted to one project with three users.

It is a wonderful tool, which has made the code review much easier. Once you have setup the tool, is integrates with Visual Studio very nicely. The features which I love this tool for are:

• Manage Users
• Integration with SVN, GIT, TFS
• A central server for storing the review details
• Context menu to add review
• With bigger teams, you can assign a reviewer for a chunk of code
• Easy to follow and get the update on code review
• Dashboard to summarize and list all reviews
• No more screenshots, annotations,  long emails for follow ups on code review
• Better productivity
• Much better product quality