Visual Assist is one of the most powerful and intelligent coding assistance solutions for Visual Studio C/C++, but how much time (or money) do development teams save with such a lightweight add-on?
In this blog post, we try to guesstimate the value of Visual Assist as a productivity and time-saving tool.
Why do developers need Visual Assist?
Before we dive into the numbers, we first need to understand why having Visual Assist is needed in the first place.
Technically speaking, VA is not necessary to code in Visual Studio. However, some developers can attest that there are projects that are almost infeasible to do without tools like VA.
For instance, those working with large C++ source code may find that the IDE’s built-in features can choke on resource-intensive processes. In this case, users will greatly benefit from VA’s highly performant and context-aware features that have been specifically designed to support the areas where Visual Studio needs it.
Now let’s do some simple calculations with some hypothetical scenarios. You will soon find out that the opportunity cost in having Visual Assist is so low and the return on investment so high that there is simply no reason to ever code without it again.
Visual Assist for Developers
For developers, the benefit of having a performant and light coding assistant is pretty easy to understand. With VA installed, coding is simply faster and easier. With a slew of features designed to support even the highly complex C++ language, developers can focus on more important tasks.
The amount a developer spends wouldn’t define the usefulness of VA. A better metric to look at would be how productive it makes you or how much time it saves.
In one of Visual Assist’s reviews, a game developer describes VA as “absolutely needed for professional programming in Visual Studio.” He explains how the features provided are basic—so much so that he was surprised that Visual Studio shipped without it in the first place.
A VA user testimonial. Read more reviews on G2.com
Disclosure: Ryan has since been recognized as a Whole Tomato MVP, but this review was submitted prior.
The value of Visual Assist for developers is that it makes development work faster and easier. It’s like investing in a good quality mouse—the regular one will do the job just too, but the added macros, extra buttons, and smoother experience in a premium mouse just feels better and more productive. You get the same results, just faster and with fewer inputs.
Visual Assist for Teams and Businesses
Project managers and developer leads are in a perpetual search of ways to make the most out of eight hours. These are the people whose decisions influence others, so they are usually more results-driven.
An analysis of our user surveys and focus group responses show that VA can increase productivity by around 20%. This means that having Visual Assist effectively reduces a 40-hour work effort to about 32 hours.
Here is an estimated-cost-savings matrix of an average project with and without Visual Assist:
Visual Assist can save teams 48-hours and $1,900 for a project that normally takes 10 work days.
VA helps maintain code by analyzing projects for technical errors and code smells. It catches issues as teams are writing code, saving them time during the testing and integration phase.
And since VA is regularly updated, the automatic prompts and corrections it suggests are always based on the latest coding and linter standards. Overall, it makes maintaining and testing code less tedious and time consuming.
These suggestions, no matter how minuscule, add up and save teams and businesses valuable time. They don’t have to spend extended periods of time manually checking code—meaning they can skip a considerable chunk of the development process.
Here are a couple of VA’s time saving features:
It’s a bit complicated to estimate how efficient code maintenance practices and tools translate into time savings, but think of it this way: for each project, how much time does your team spend on finding, fixing, and testing errors, both minor and major,?
Easily deploy Visual Assist
VA is a VS plugin and can be easily deployed. It does not matter if you install it before or during a project. Deploying with Visual Studio is a no-frills process with no additional investment for hardware required.
It has no known compatibility issues, so it should work with any other plugin you may have installed. Its features are customizable, so you can choose which functions to use and which to disable.
Get started with Visual Assist and experience a better and faster Visual Studio today.
