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.
This would be helpful for us as well.
Last year when I asked Smartbear about this though, they mentioned that they've had the request quite a few times before, but at that time, management decided to keep to having only the two states on the checklist, no comments.
In the case above an aditional state of -1 could help, but looking at the database (reviewchecklistitem) the state is char(1), so adding other states should be possible - though not sure about the gui client code.
As for the commenting part itself - I was advised to just add the comments to the general section, which probably won't be ideal as you may sometimes have a lot of noise and discussions going through there.
Not sure about the underlying complexity in the GUI code, but they should be able to add comments *against* the checklist items at least. The events seem to be stored in reviewchecklistevent, so really only need a text field in there to be populated.
You won't always want to change the state of the button when you add a comment, so they should really be independent from each other.
would be helpful for us as well.
add a custom field to the checklist. this resolved our need.
