Review Assistant vs. GoCD

Combined with Code Compare and running Review Assistant on the TFS server, it provides a good way to share code and comments amount our team. It does everything we need it to do for code reviews and has a reporting tool.

Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.

Incentivized

• Review Assistant does everything that I was hoping the default Visual Studio reviews would do. The iterations through accept/reject were the key winner.
• The functionality for code reviews is great, especially the ability to comment on specific lines of code.
• You don't have to leave the IDE.

• Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
• The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
• Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.

Incentivized

• Integration with JIRA is missing.
• Ability to search, filter and order comments.
• There is no support for Visual Studio Code.

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

Microsoft provides a handy feature for code review inside the Visual Studio IDE. Review Assistant, though providing a similar code review user experience, supports work scenarios that are not covered by the Microsoft's IDE. Moreover, the version control systems support is broader in Review Assistant.

GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.

Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.

Incentivized

• The tool saves a huge amount of time while reviewing the code. Review Assistant supports threaded comments, so team members can discuss code without scheduled meetings.

• ROI has been good since it's open source
• Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
• More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date

Incentivized