Collaborator Feature Requests

An email is sent out to every member in the group list when the annotation phase starts => Can this be disabled? ... View more

Currently if a user enters a URL beginning with "http://" the URL will be automatically converted to a hyperlink. We have some applications that use custom protocols and it would be nice if those were also converted to hyperlinks. If there is reason to not just convert any protocol to a hyperlink then it would be nice if the admin could specify an explicit list of protocols to convert to hyperlinks. ... View more

When using the Automatic Links feature, generated links currently always open in a new window (they have the HTML attribute target="_blank" set). However, some URL protocols are handled by locally installed applications instead of actually showing up in the browser window. For protocols like this, the user is left with an empty new browser window (or tab) that they have to manually close.   It would be nice to have an option when creating an Automatic Link for whether or not the generated link should open in a new window. ... View more

I think the feature is just buggy, but I want to be reliably notified when a reviewer or observer has added comments or defects on a review I authored.  Sometimes I get emails, sometimes I don't and I can't trust it enough to know that I don't need to take any action just because nothing is in my inbox.  So I just end up polling Collaborator repeatedly, or I ignore it for a couple of hours if I get busy only to find that my reviewer dutifully made comments a while ago and I didn't know.  This leads to inefficiency in our workflow. ... View more

Currently emails go out to all participants in a review.  However, there are two very common scenarios in which emails are sent that are annoying and don't provide any extra value.   1) When I create a review I get an email that says "You are a Author for new Review #XXX".  This should not be sent, I know I am the author of the review.   2) When I am the reviewer that completes a review I get an email saying the review is complete.  This isn't necessary, I just completed it.  Now I guess you could have a race condition where two people are reviewing and click Approve at nearly the same time and so you might not realize you're approval was actually ending the review, but I would argue for this to happen no one made any defects or comments so it doesn't matter you still don't care.  But at a minimum if there is only one reviewer, and they click approve, they don't need an email. ... View more

I frequently keep one browser (on Windows) open to a review I am creating using the Linux GUI client to upload files to the review.  Uploading from subversion workspace might take a number of uploads from various project root directories.  I am always dismissing the browser after the launch of each one.  It would be nice to have a persistent preferences setting to speficy whether or not to launch a browser after uploading. ... View more

One of our teams would like to perform reviews where Collaborator prevents all the following scenarios:   * Review is held up indefinitely because a reviewer never answers * Review is held up indefinitely because the wrong reviewer was invited * Author gets impatient with a held-up review and finishes it early (before it's had enough review)   The first two problems are caused by too strict of a workflow, and the third is caused by not having a strict enough workflow.  Ideally, we'd like the review to work like this:   1. Author sets two deadlines: one for accepting (i.e., agreeing to begin) a review, and one for completing it. 2. Author sends invitations.  At this point, the review is locked; the author cannot make any changes. 3. If any reviewer refuses to begin the review, or if the acceptance deadline passes without everyone accepting, the review is unlocked and the author may go back to step 1 to choose new reviewers / deadlines. 4. If all reviewers agree to begin the review, the review starts.  The review is still locked (author cannot make changes). 5. Reviewers read the code, make comments, etc. 6. When all reviewers have marked the review as finished, or when the completion deadline passes, the review is kicked back over to the author in either the Finished state or the Preparation state (depending on whether or not everyone marked it as Finished).   With this workflow, no review would ever be held up because a reviewer ignored a review invitation, or accepted an invitation but dragged their heels reviewing it.  Conversely, no author would be able to push a review through before everyone has had a chance to see it.   The only way I can think to do this in the current Collaborator version is to use the Moderator role, and have that person perform all the gatekeeping manually (perhaps coupled with turning on review deadlines).  That seems like overkill, though, and a lot of manual work.  Is there a way for Collaborator to gate these steps in the process automatically?   ... View more

Lack of filtering capability adversely impacts reviewers and authors. Would be beneficial to be able to filter comments to those raised by a reviewer Those that reviewer added their support to etc. This would be very useful for looking at your own comments and comments from team members rather than seeing everything at once.  Also for authors for discussing individually submitted comments.  There could be a subfilter to include followup comments by others rather than just a specific individual. The Display choices could be expanded to include this capability.    ... View more

Currently, our environment has two CCM servers for IBM Rational Team Concert.  Below are the steps taken:   Create a work item task on project located on first server Check-in all and deliver from second server project and 'Associate Change Request' from first server project (This will create Change Sets (Remote), under work item task link) Change state to 'Closed' in work item task and Code Review does NOT get created (in our environment, changing a work item to 'Closed' will generate an automated code review within Code Collaborator using the RTC server-side plugin)   We would like SmartBear to take into account there are clients out there who have this scenario and can address this as high priority.  Currently, our Developers are creating manual reviews and it is becoming a big pain-point.  This makes it very difficult, complicated and very frustrating for the reviewers / end-users. This also defeats the purpose of having a Code Collaborator server-side plugin for automation.   Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you! ... View more

Using multi-select fields, we cannot enforce that at least one item was selected before moving out of the planning phase.  This could be a useful feature for fields that are required and could have more than one value (for example, work product(s) being reviewed in this record).   It would be great if the tool easily allowed us to do this to ensure that all our records have the appropriate information for reporting & data analysis. ... View more

Set pages for reviews on the main page so everything isn’t loaded directly when accessing and be able to increase or decrease that review count shown on it. ... View more