Code inspection: Member can be made protected (non-private accessibility)
ReSharper is smart enough to determine where a particular class member is actually being used. If it isn’t used outside the type or derived types, ReSharper will offer to mark the member as private. If the member is used in derived classes too, ReSharper will offer to mark it as protected.
Note that these recommendations need to be considered before being automatically applied. After all, you may be creating a public API, or you may be making types intended to be accessed in non-standard ways (for example, reflection). In this case, constraining visibility might not be a good idea. If necessary, you can always suppress the inspection.
For the solution-wide inspection to work, you need to enable at least one of the following:
Simplified global usage checking: select Show unused non-private type members when solution-wide analysis is off on the page of ReSharper options Alt+R, O.
Solution-wide analysis: select Enable solution-wide analysis on the page of ReSharper options Alt+R, O.
Note that even if the reported member has no direct usages in your solution, there could be cases where it is used indirectly — for example, via reflection — or it could just be designed as public API. In all those cases, you would want to suppress the usage-checking inspection for the member in one of the following ways:
The recommended way is to decorate the implicitly used member with a code annotation attribute. There are two attributes for this purpose: [UsedImplicitly] and [PublicAPI], which are functionally similar, but let you and your teammates understand how the member is actually used.
You can also suppress usage-checking inspections with any custom attribute. To do so, mark the definition of that attribute with the [MeansImplicitUse] attribute.
And finally, you can suppress a specific usage-checking inspection as any other code inspection with a suppression comment or a suppression attribute.