Recently, I reiterated over some code review tools that I used back in the days and also looked at some new players in this field.
Top candidates were review-board, Phabricator and GitHub.
Unfortunately, I could not find a tool that covers my 2 basic needs:
- As a developer, I want to browse in my programming IDE (VS 2019) and if I see code that could be improved, I just mark all code I want to discuss, and start a code review from these code lines, to discuss possible solutions, without changing the code (no commit or diff file).
- As a developer, I want to browse my repository history (git), select multiple commits with a simple mouse click and start a review from these commits.
The first use case is covered by Github, both Phabricator and Reviewboard do not support this use case. What I see is a problem in definition tbh. Reviewboard and Phabricator are actually commit review tools, not code review tools. What I want in the first case is to review code before it gets changed. I'm probably searching for the wrong tool then (wrong name) since all "code review" tools do not support this feature. Does someone know a good code review tool/plugin for visual studio or visual studio code which is asynchronous (not like visual studio life share that closes the session)?
The second use case is the basic of the basics imo, but it's not covered by any of the tools. I'm not talking about a solution of cherry picking in console and creating a diff file I can upload. I want to use a UI to select my commits and start a review, without touching console, without a branch and a pull request.
Is there a tool that covers both use cases? Can be open-source, but also commercial.
