Collaborator Reports - Include Record Count
Collaborator's reporting feature doesn't include the count of how many records were found. This would be helpful information when trying to do a quick comparison with an earlier query run, to see if any new reviewshad been created (for example). It would also save one from having to count manually or take the extra steps of exporting the results to a CSV file in order to count the number of records.
Collaborator 11
Remove host/ip info from messages sent to users as it isin my opinion useless info and can be a security concern. In our instance, the server is behind a reverse proxy. Users only know the url. The host info is registered in DNS to the proxy. Sending the actual server's host info to the user on a password reset is meaningless and negates the purpose of the proxy to hide the actual server from the end users.Like line numbers, Pin references should be hotlinks
Line numbers entered in a comment or defect become links. Likewise, pin references should become links, so when I enter "Pin 25" in a comment, if Pin 25 exists, that should become a hot link to the pin. In document reviews with many comments it becomes very difficult to locate a referenced pin.
Checklist improvement - 2
There needs to be some provision for adding a comment to a checklist item. For example... if a checklist item is not applicable then the author or moderator could check the item and add a comment that it is not applicable. This would allow the checklist to be mandatory but flexible enough that one checklist could be used for multiple reviews.Limit reminder emails before review deadline
We have many users who are complaining that they are receiving too many notification emails from our Collaborator server. For some users who have other things to do in the short term and plan to get their comments in closer to the deadline,receiving regular "reminder" emails for reviews they did not forget and are not late are considered an annoyance. I see a couple of options that could be implemented: A global setting indicating that the review wouldn't be considered 'stalled' until after the deadline, or within X hours of the deadline. A per-user setting allowing someone to specify that reminder emails should not be sent until X hours before the review deadline. After the deadline has passed, I think it is fair to continue with the regular reminder emails as currently specified in the Collaborator server settings.
PDF Filename containing the "version" is not supported?
Hi! We encourage our employees to add a version to a PDF or DOC file name so it's easier to handle on the local disk, fileserver, webserver or in an email to a customer. But collaborator can't match a file like "OurManual_V1.0.0.pdf" and "OurManual_V2.0.0.pdf" to be the same. Easiest might be to add the option in the webinterface "Upload->File" to select an already existing file and state that this is the newer version of it (although the name has changed slightly) or did I overlook an option in the GUI or the commanline tools?
Can you add a free form text field to the role assignment section of a review?
I would like to request that a freeform text field be added to the role assignment portion of the review screen that allows you to document the specific role assignment that each person has on the review. This is different than the moderator, reviewer, author, etc. It is in relation to the role this person has representing a particular effort. In our case, we have specific work products that require specific program involvement from specific roles like a SW lead, or a Project Engineer, or a Program Manager. When I identify someone in a review as a reviewer, I want to be able to identify them as the program manager, Project Engineer, etc.We don't want to have a separate template for every work product we review, we want to keep that generic enough to use the same template, but we want to be able to identify who each person is.We could create a custom field, but we want this to be tied to each review participant directly.A custom filed would not have that tie. I want to be able to show that all of the required reviewers for this particular work product were participants. Unless I tie them to the actual participants that have time recorded, I can't prove that they were involved. See below for an example. Review Role AssignmentProgram Role Asssignment Author System Engineer Moderator Lead Systems Engineer Reviewer Quality Assurance Reviewer Program Manager ReviewerTest Engineer I need to be able to show that the relevant stakeholders participated in the review. A custom field does not tie a program role with the time spent in the review, but if thereview rolecould have a place to identify the program role, it could be on the same line in the review summary screen.Jira Reporter Username - Export Issue
Hello, When I export issue to Jira, I have some problem about Jira Reporter. Scenario: Note 1- Jira and Collaborator have same LDAP Authorization. 1- Export Issue after editting Defect with userA. 2- When I visit to Jira Issue, REPORTER = Jira LDAP admin account. I would like to see the reporter as userA in Jira Issue. Is it responsibility of Jira or Collaborator or both? Regards.
Provide facility to add new language syntax highlighting
We're reviewing source code in a language that is not currently supported by Collaborator (Ada). It would be useful to be able to add a language syntax highlighting definition. There are other tools, e.g. Ultraedit, that do this with a simple text file that lists keywords against formatting options (colour, bold etc). The filename extensions are then mapped to the language definition.
Subversion authentication
Our subversion server is configured to use authentication - each user has username and password which (s)he uses. Each repository and directory on the server have different access rules, so that each user can see only those sources that he has authorization for. Now as collaborator is setup to use a single username/password when accessing svn, this creates a hole in the authorization scheme. Each user who has access to collaborator can use collaborator to access sources in every repository and directory collaborator has access to. A proposed solution: Make collaborator ask for svn username and password when uploading sources from subversion.Add ability to disable NEWS
Apparently Collaborator Enterprise on an installed system reaches out to SmartBear (home base) to get an RSS news feed (to display on the WebUI home screen I assume) We have Collaborator installed on a closed environment on an internal network. My admin is unhappy an installed program keeps trying to call home, and having to deal with the log/failures generated when that can’t happen. A response to a problem ticket indicated that this feature cannot be turned off. I ask that a setting (or such) be added to disable news, so machines without internet access don’t have to deal with this news retrieval issue.Filter on own comments
To improve the user experience of Collaborator, users would like have the possibility to filter on ones own comments when having to mark findings fixed. It would speed up the entire review process when a reviewer does not need to delve through all comments of other reviewers when looking for his/her own review comments.Support Multiple Conversation Threads
Currently Collaborator only supports one thread of conversation per document / code location. This makes it increasingly difficult to track the individual threads when multiple unique comments are added to the same location (or overall) & replies start coming in. Adding this could also provide opportunities to reduce the number of email notifications coming in for some users - for example, only notify me when someone replies to a comment / finding made by me. Note that the software would still need to consider some review templates / role types, for example moderatorswho are required to read all comments.Improved filtering feature
The filtering feature of defects on the left (e.g. “Show/Hide conversations with fixed defects”) is implemented as “collapse” instead of “hide”. So this means the defects will still be in the list although collapsed. This is no problem if you have 5 defects but in large documents with 100 defects this is really annoying. Please don’t show hidden status at all.Confirm before leaving page with unsaved text
An in inspection, you can add comments, defects, etc by typing text into a box on the left of your screen, then clicking "Add". We've had users enter text and forget to click the add button, and navigated away (return to inspection summary button), thus losing all their entered text. Many other web sites will recognize you have text in a text box and will bring up a "Do you really want to navigate away from this page" dialog box, where a user can chose ot stay on the page and save their forgotten text. A sample of such a dialog is attached. It woudl be nice if SB/Collaborator implemented such a feature, so user comments wouldn't be accidently lost. (Yes, I had a user fill in 5-6 boxes with lots of text and navigate away, losing it all...) - Jsyntax highlighting in comments
Syntax highlighting for added source code blocks into comments/bugs/defects (like review board or crucible). E. g. the reviewer creates a comment and suggest a better solution for a code snippet and inserts the suggested solution (code snippet) in the comment. It would be helpfull if this code snippet would have syntax highlighting .Disabled users should be accessible when generating reports
When running reports, the user lists show only those users that are active/enabled. In order to run a report based on a disabled user, one must re-activate the user. This introduces a security risk just to run a report. Users get disabled for many reasons (incorrect credentials, folks leave the company, etc.) and managers/supervisors still need to be able to run reports against those users. User lists in the report screens need to show ALL users, not just active users.Request a JSON API that can list all currently open reviews
As a Collaborator user, I want Collaborator to provide a JSON API to retrieve all current open reviews (reviews that are not completed) from the Collaborator server, so that I can use the API in my script (eg: Python) to do some additional work. So far such functionalityonly exists in the Web UI via "Reviews Currently In Progress" under "Report" page.
Approve ... Until (like Wait options)
In general, Code Collaborator has several annoying and time-wasting cases of throwing reviewers out of approval; thisfeature would help address some of them: Upon clicking "Wait" there are several options to control when you will be pulled out of Waiting. It would super nice if there were similar options added for "Approve". For example: I'd like to click "Approve" and have it present a similar list of options. Givne the current behavior of Approve, it seems that the option selected would be"Activity by Author Occurs". Then I'd like to select a different option, like "File Activity Occurs" so that I can stay in the Approval state, despite newly added comments by the author. This would help prevent annoying cases such as throwing reviewers out of Approval near the end of reviews; say because some other reviewer posted a question to which the author responds (perhaps to educate them on something) but where the new comments are trivial to the actual approval-ness of the review. This should not throw the approved reviewers out of Approval, but currently the authors comment does, and so that just turns into annoying time-waste communication between author and reviewer (via Pokes, email, chats, in-person, etc) to get reviews re-approved. At some in a code review, reviewers are satisfied with the code and approve based on that, so anyfurther comments afterward, without file activity, is most often just unnecessary noise to them.Remember Previously Entered Defect Field Values
We have some custom fields set for our defects (severity, etc). Often when entering multiple defects, the same values would be entered, so it would be nice if the values for the fields defaulted to the values entered in the previous defect to save time.
Default Template to use on new reviews
Not sure if this already exists somewheer in the depths of the beast, but it would be nice to be able to set the review template to use for a new review based on the user group or name or some other user/admin configurable setting? even a default template for all new reviews. Currently when you create a new review the default template used is often one which the users have no use for, and need to change, often after they have filled in a lot of details, so changing the template to use then resets the form. This is not a problem for the reviews created by script as the template is clearly defined. But where thereview is created from the GUI client or web interface, it uses a totally different review template by default, not even the old "Default".
Improve the color coding in the Review Materials section
Review: Review Materials In the Review Materials section, the color coding is confusing. Draw a box around all the lines that belong together. YELLOW shows you what you haven't marked as read but if you have many files with many separate comments, it's easy to get lost when reviewing. Some sort of grouping would be helpful.See MOCK UP below (with a blue grouping outline).Configuration for a multi-server environment
For environments that are larger and need some server redundancy, it would be nice to have a multi-server configuration available. The servers would be behind a load balancer of some sort and traffic would be divided between the two or more servers hosting the Collaborator application.non-mandatory checklists are easily forgotten by the reviewer
Because checklist items are either hot or cold (mandatory or non-mandatory), Reviewers can forget the checklist entirely when checklists are non-mandatory. Our use case is that out of the checklist items some may not apply to the current review, so we are forced to make them ALL non-mandatory. There are several approaches to the problem, two come to mind. 1) if no check list items are checked; ask did you forget to review the checklist items dialog box? 2) allow individual items on the check list to be mandatory or non-mandatory.Show all of added files as green (added) better
There is a use case where an author uploads a file added to source control to a review, so that it shows it as all added code and it is not compared against a previous version because it is new. Then the author makes a change to the file, and reuploads. Collaborator now compares the two versions and shows only one line changing. This happens despite the "Diff Viewer Default Version Comparison".It is easy for a reviewer to not realize that the whole file is new in this use case. It would be good to at least have the option to show the whole file as new so that this confusion can be avoided.Implement sync of GitHub pull request reviewers and Collaborator reviewers
Submitted on behalf of Debdas Mondal (HSBC). GitHub pull requests may have reviewers assigned to them. It should be possible to synchronize the list of pull request reviewers and the list of a linked Collaborator review's participants.Convert "restricted" ASCII file types to TXT (or another safe format) on upload
We have users that can no longer upload certain file types(for example, .SH, .BAT, etc. which do need to be peer reviewed) because they are restricted file types. I understand the need for this feature and think it is a good idea to block potentially malicious files from being uploaded, however we are trying to figure out a good way to leverage this feature yet still accommodate users who need to upload and peer review these sorts of files. Renaming the extension to .TXT before upload is a workaround but doesn't work well when trying to upload from source control. What would be great is if in addition to "Restricted File Types", Collaborator hadan additional list of "Restricted File Types - Convert to Safe Format" that would automatically convert these files into a safe format - maybe by automatically adding at .TXT extension? This would allow users to peer review scripting-type files to the server, and protect the rest of the user community from potentially malicious uploads at the same time.Allow participants to sort the 'Review Materials' grid by the 'status' and 'changed lines' columns
The existing grid under the 'Review Materials' section is rigid. It does not allow the participants to quickly identify key changes. For instance, a participant might have to scroll thru the a huge changelist to identify files having reworked changes or many affected lines. Solution > allowthe participant to sort the existing 'Status' and 'Changed lines' columns in descending order to focus on key changes.
Add subscriptions based on project and/or feature and other fields
Engineers want to have a set of users added to all reviews created for a particular feature instead of having the author add the same set of reviewers/observers each time. It will be great to have this feature. I can see we already have subscription based on Author and Files.Provide a way to bulk/automatically delete stale open reviews
I've found that our CC instance had a significant amount of open reviews, some over two years old with no activity. Some were "false starts" where people had created the review but didn't upload files or add reviewers. I had to manually go to each and delete as there didn't appear to be a way to do that in bulk. It would be great if there were a way to bulk or automatically delete open reviews older than a certain amount of time. Perhaps the system can notify review participants that the review is in danger of being deleted a week prior.Allow filter of existing changelists when uploading to CC via Client tool
When I upload my code from Perforce to Code Collaborator the client tool allows me to "Create New Review" or "Add to Existing Review". "Add to Existing Review" pulls back all open reviews, including ones that are not relevant to me. Ideally the tool would also give me the option to filter this list to reviews that I am participating in (either as author/reviewer/observer/etc). It's annoying when you're in a situation where there are significant amounts of open reviews to have to skim through to find yours. Thanks.Diff tool option - Do not display line #s inline
Would like to see a display option added in the web view of the diff tool screen where Line #s would not be shown. We have a few use cases where a .sql script is being reviewed by a reviewer and they want to copy/paste the script into their IDE to run. When you attempt to copy multiple lines you end up copying the line #s as well which requires you to scrub the resulting paste before you can execute your sql. Alternatively, allowing the line #s to be outside of the selecting content area would also resolve this issue.Add option to toggle display of angle quotes in the Diff Viewer
It would be helpful to be able to toggle the display of these indicators. The "Ignore Whitespace" option does not affect them, but I'd prefer a separate option anyway. I do care about whitespace changes, and having these marks in the "After" pane can make it difficult to tell if a change fixed or created an alignment issue. Here's a screen capture of one in the "Before" pane.Code Collaborator -- Reviewer -- Keyboard Shortcuts
Web-based Code Collaborator has beena great tool for us! We spend a lot of time with it. But that is also a curse: can you help us spend less time with it,by providing keyboard shortcut keys for frequent reviewer actions (such as these listed below)? Extra points if the shortcut keys can be configurable (perhaps in Settings?), but I understand that beggars can't be choosers. Of course, the tooltip hint should reveal the shortcut key. Speed/ease of use has been an obstacle to Code Collaborator adoption for some of our team. Thanks for considering! Go to Next/Prev Location Page down/up Add Add as Issue Defect Type Severity Add Issue Edit Mark FixedAutomatic Periodic Notification Blackout Window
The 'Automatic Periodic Notification' feature shown below is nice but I would suggest having a 'blackout window' during which Collaboratordoes NOTsend out email notification for stalled reviews or any other cases that require action from the participants. The function doesn’t have the ability to set any sort of ‘operating hours’ or black out time. We have had issues where a developer might create a review right near the end of the day and no one had a chance to look at it; well when everyone comes in the morning the other Collab users have gotten spammed with a emails coming out of the system every 2 hours. I would like Collaborator to know not to send out reminders at 3am when nobody will be using the system. The situation gets even worse when a user creates a review at the end of the day on Friday – then we get spammed with over 24 emails until folks come in Monday morning. The email spam detracts from the usefulness of this feature as users started to ignore the email ‘noise’ coming out of Collaborator. I could dial the threshold to greater than 2 hours, but then again during daytime operating hours I think people should get spammed if they aren’t doing their reviews. Is there a backend property or setting where we could set ‘offline’ hours for Automatic Periodic Notification’?
Collapse review information section for a single review item (code or doc file)
In section "Review Materials" each sub-section for a single document should be possible to collapse or elapse. Currently all documents and their comments/defects are visible which results in a very large list. Grouping them and add the possibility to collapse such a group or section would make the list much better readable.Collaborator feature request: allow "sticky" approval for reviewer
The feature I'd like to request is to allow a reviewer to optionally choose to have their approval "stick" if all of their defects have been addressed in a review. As an example scenario: Reviewer 1 opens a defect Reviewer 2 opens a defect Review is sent to Rework Author corrects Reviewer 1's defect in an upload Review marks their defect as 'fixed' and approves the review Author uploads new version correcting Review 2's defect With the current functionality, Reviewer 1 will be required to re-approve their review even though their defect was already fixed in the previous upload. Reviews frequently move between inspection and rework several times as defects and corrections are debated, with some reviewers' defects being completely fixed in early iterations. The current implementation requires that they continue to mark a review as approved in each iteration even though, for them, nothing has changed.Add more available roles.
At least one of our inspection templates is for Fagan style reviews, where you have your standard roles of moderator, reader, author, inspector, but additional roles such as observer, auditor, recorder (when we do have meetings to discuss things). While Collaborator eliminates the need for meetings, there are times we could use more than 4 named roles. Even if the permission for some roles are the same, having the name in place becomes meaningful. (Like adding the task lead to a review, but as an Observer so it’s clear they are not expected to review anything). Any other users run into this??Maintain user adjusted split screen ratio
When reviewing the difference (compare) screen of a file, the screen comes up split 50/50 – have the screen is one copy of a document and half the screen is the other copy. SB allows you to drag the split line, enabling you to show more of one document and less of another. Unfortunately, some operations in this window, including just clicking in one of the windows, will cause SB to snap back to the 50/50 split. It becomes very cumbersome to have to keep re-sizing your window if you so much as click in the wrong place. Can the split screen adjustment be set to maintain the ratio set by the user on the document they are currently viewing.Make the Number of Completed reviews shown on the home page configurable.
In the WebUI, the number of completed reports that can are shown on your individual home page is 10. If you want to see more completed reports, you have to go into the report functionality and generate yourself a custom report. We often have more than 10 reports that have been recently completed, and having to generate reports to see more has been a pain. (we had 18 reviews going on, and as moderator I wanted to ‘see completed’ to make sure they were being closed out correctly) Talking to SB support, 10 is apparently a random decision. I propose the number of completed reports be configurable, with site wide by an individual. Configuration could be by number of reports or date range. (or both if you want happy customers. :)Show deleted Clearcase files in the review materials as the deleted revisions.
Submitting the RFE on behalf of Johann Glaser from Infineon Technologies AG-verification: We are facing trouble adding ClearCase files to Collaborator. The specific file has been deleted, and we want to add it so that the reviewers see that it is gone.
Collaborator Feature Requests
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