Until now, developers haven’t had an in-context way to guide reviewers in pull requests. They can submit a written overview of their changes, but the process isn’t collaborative or interactive—they can’t communicate code details in the context of the visualized codebase.

Developers could eliminate friction and misunderstanding in review by providing guidance in the context of the code.

Introducing Review Map Tours

With Review Map Tours, create step-by-step, visual walkthroughs of changes on your CodeSee Review Maps. Pull request authors can offer insight into coding decisions and provide review guidance, like where to begin and how to navigate tricky logic—alerting reviewers on what’s relevant and reducing file switching.

Show where to start the review

Provide a starting point for the reviewing dev and mark important steps in your change.

Explain the how/where/why behind your change

Communicate details about your coding decisions so the reviewer understands your intent.

Point out what’s important (and not)

Focus reviewers’ attention on what’s relevant, reducing file switching and redundant review.

Visually walk through code flows and tricky logic

Offer tips to review tricky code, so the reviewer can easily navigate and understand changes.

Highlight structural changes

Highlight changes to functionality or structure and explain the impact of the change.

The experience

As the pull request author, you can create a Review Map Tour using comments. First, identify what you’d like to communicate to the reviewer. This will help you determine how and where to place the Tour to your code. You can use each step of your Tour to offer insight into your coding decisions, provide review tips, and request guidance from the reviewer.

As the pull request reviewer, you can view a Review Map Tour to glean additional context about the changes. Access the Review Map Tour on the left panel of your CodeSee interface and navigate through the 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons to walk through the Tour. Then, leave comments as needed and submit your review of the pull request!

To learn more about using Review Map Tours, head over to the docs.

Are you involved with an open source project? We encourage contributors to use Review Map Tours to walk project maintainers through their new contributions. And to find your next OSS project, check out Open Source Hub—our community platform helping contributors and maintainers eliminate the barriers to taking on a new codebase.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of what Review Map Tours can do! This feature will make your experience using CodeSee Review Maps a lot more informative, collaborative, and, dare we say, enjoyable.

To begin using Review Map Tours, log in or sign up with CodeSee.