Collaborator Feature Requests

Submitting the RFE on behalf of James Wagner from L-3 Technologies, CSG: Allow reviewers to change what they are waiting for, when the review is in the Rework phase. For example, a reviewer wants to become Active only when the File Activity occurs instead of Any activity. ... View more

Our workflow is such that we want to clearly define when control of a review moves to a different participant. For example, I create a review and annotate it, and then move it to the inspect phase. The review progress then appears in my action items list (and on the system tray window) as "Waiting for comments".   However, as soon as the reviewer makes their first comment, it switches back to Perform, which is a nuisance since frequently the reviewer is still working on the review - they may find that a later file answers a question they'd asked, so they go back and delete an earlier comment, or edit one. The result is that I start responding to a comment which then gets updated or deleted by the reviewer, who isn't expecting me to have resumed work on the review since they haven't yet clicked "Wait".   It would be nice to have an option whereby Collaborator will leave the review progress as it is until the "Active" participant(s) click "Wait" to wait for further activity. This way, the reviewer can add/edit/delete their comments, approve files etc until they're happy that it's ready to pass back to the author, and only then have the author notified that it's ready for them again. Similarly, when the author then responds to the comments, the same functionality would prevent the reviewer from being asked to respond to the comments until the author had finished writing them.   This would not need to prevent participants from participating at any time, as it is very useful to have this ability - it would just prevent one person's changes from causing other participants to be notified and the review progress on their action lists to change. ... View more

Debian and Ubuntu Linux at least now ship MariaDB as the default instead of MySQL. I've recently installed v11.3 on Debian 9.5 (Stretch) with MariaDB v10.1 and it seems to work correctly, but it would be nice for the installation instructions to indicate that MariaDB is a supported database. ... View more

Submitted on behalf of Microsemi (Formerly PMC-Sierra)   The motivation for us stems from the cause that usually even project admins have to contact system admins to uncancel a review. It'd be great if there was a feature enhancement for group admins to be able to uncancel a review.   Maybe add a new setting that will allow, "Everyone | Group admins | Author | Creator", to UNCANCEL reviews.     ... View more

1) Defects: List all defects associated with all the reviews in a project 2) Reports: Add a report to list all reviews for a project ... View more

I have a team working on Gitlab integration with Colalborator. When merge requests are made on the GIT side, a Collaborator review is automatically created. Unfortunately, the Group and Templateis selected somewhat randomly.    According to customer service they are "The last Group and Templated that the merge author happened to use".  Often this is the wrong choice.  WHen we change them by hand we then lose all the other auto filled data in the review.   Give how well the GIT / Collaborator integration is set up, it would be nice to have a way to specify Group and Template to use for the review.  ... View more

Several of our users complain about the volume of emails that they receive from Collaborator even when the setting is adjusted to minimal. Is it possible to collect the notifications in a different format such as a single digest email instead of an email per review? (e.g. You are a participant in X reviews which are past due. You have Y stalled reviews currently.) ... View more

I want to be able to edit or completely delete (with no trace) comments and defects I have added.   Strikout is not a good alternative; it wastes everyone's time to look at something that should have been deleted. The ability to edit or cleanly delete previously entered text is near-universal in systems that store user-entered text, and there are many good reasons for this.   In addition to those universally applicable reasons, the CC interface makes it easy to attach a comment or defect to the wrong line,. Further, the basic model of file-at-a-time reviewing with no global search or symbol lookup makes it difficult to review large or multi-file changes. When reviewing such changes, I often make comments that become moot when later functions or files are examined. I'm then reduced to either entering a later "never mind" comment (strikeout is only a slight improvement, because most authors are still going to waste time reding it) and/or effectively implementing my own "undo" by keeping all my comments and defects in a separate text file until I'm completely done, then going back in a second pass and actually entering them.  ... View more

Collaborator (and all Web-based tools, really) should retire any use of Adobe Flash.  The same functionality is now available natively in standards-compliant HTML5 browsers, which are commonplace at this time.     Flash Player is a never-ending source of security issues, causes grief for IT administrators, and is constantly pining for updates.  If it weren't for Collaborator, I could remove the flash plugin from my system entirely and enjoy improved security.       ... View more

Hello,   Our Dev team can create some reviews containing a lot of various files (eg. *.cs, *.xml, *.csproj, *.config...). When reviewing the files under the 'Review Materials' section, we would like to filter the files by their extension types so that we can focus on the most important changes.   For instance, we can have just a few critical changes located under some .cs files and many unimportant changes in our .csproj files. In such cases, we would like to see at one glance the modified .cs files.   Thanks Thomas ... View more

Submitting a feature request on behalf of Symantec Corp: There is no possibility to add a Perforce SCM repository in Collaborator Visual Studio plugin at this moment. The idea is to add Perforce SCM support to Collaborator Visual Studio plugin to make it possible. ... View more

When you generate a report in the WebUI, you can print it, and you can copy the link to include in your bookmarks, email etc.      It would be nice if I could save these reports within the WebUI itself.   They would be accessible from any location where you executed the WebUI, and possibly be available for other users to run.   On the basic side, users could have a ‘my reports’ section where saved reports could live.   On the complex side, reports could be public/private (checkbox) and maybe restricted by group or public.     Reports are such a powerful tool for data extraction and analysis, yet managing them within the UI could be so much more efficient.     (I thought I had submitted this previously but I can’t find it in the forum…) ... View more

Collaborator is configured such that once any defect has been found in any file of a review, then no files in that review can be removed.   Your only option is to delete the review and make a new review.   This has been proved to be an inconvenience.   We’ve had people add files to a review they should not have. We’re human – it’s going to happen.   There is currently no way to remove those files from an active review; and deleting the whole review would lose defects found on files we do want to be reviewed.      SB support says this is expected behavior, but I think we users would benefit if this were allowed.    (It could be customizable via Roles to allow at all, or limit to certain roles).  ... View more

Hi, the authentication via LDAP is a nice feature to organize the user registration in a world-wide environment by use of several AD groups that can be administered business-unit-specific. Unfortunately the user is not known in Collaborator until his/her first log in. This results in three steps: 1. Adding to AD group 2. User must log in 3. Project admin can add user to group Each step results in a latency and communication overhead between the admin and the user. It would be great to have a button in Collaborator's user management panel like "sync with configured AD group xy" (similar to RTC for example). ... View more

Howdy,   Please add Code Collaborator support for AWS Code Commit repository integrations to the web client.   Example of this current functionality can be found here: https://support.smartbear.com/collaborator/docs/source-control/git.html https://support.smartbear.com/collaborator/docs/source-control/repo-hosting/index.html   In the same way that Github, Bitbucket, and Azure can easily be integrated to the Collaborator, I would like for this process to also function with AWS Code Commit Repos. I may currently use Code Collab and AWS Code Commit via the client gui and local changes, but I would also like to have direct repo integration like the hosted repos do.   Thanks. ... View more

It's annoying to get thrown out of Approval in several cases; but some cases are valid. Either way, what can be further annoying is not having Code Collaborator indicate any information in the code review webpage on whether or not reviewers had previously been in the Approval state.   It would be nice, if the State column, indicated in some way, that users (reviewers/observers/whatever) had previously been in an Approved state but now are not.   With so many code reviews going on, it's easy to second-guess yourself on "didn't I approve this already"?  And having the tool help keep oneself up-to-date on such matters would be handy.  Also, as an Author, it'd be nice to see the same information; as that may help lead the author to know which subset of reviewers really needs to pay more attention to the review (because perhaps the reviewer's that need to re-approve in this case were and are actively and responsively enganged with the review, but some subset of other reviewers are behind needing to get to it still). ... View more

If a Reviewer (or Observer) is in the Approval state, then it is totally unnecessary, and indeed quite annoying and time-wasting, to have that reviewer taken out of Approval upon that reviewer being poked.   It would be much better, if Poking a user (via individual Poke or via Poking Everyone) left users in their state of Approval.   This would allievate issues such as: 1) Author clicks "Poke Everyone" (perhaps because several reviewers need to look at the review), but the unintended consequence is that it can throw a couple other reviewers out of Approval (thus wasting their time, because nothing else changed up to that point that would have otherwise thrown them out of Approval).  Sure, the author could have individually poke only the necessary subset of users, but that less desirable alternative basically leaves the "Poke Everyone" button mostly useless. 2) Similarly, an Author may accidentaly poke a specific user; maybe missed the State column's claim that the user was in Approval and then miss-poked the user.  Either way, it's the same downsides as above, but with no alternative via Code Collab.   In general, Code Collaborator has several annoying and time-wasting cases of throwing reviewers out of approval; this is one of them; please do fix!  Thanks 🙂 ... View more

We have some users with the same initials when using two initials, so have enabled the 3 initials. With three initials, it displays the second letter of the user's first name, but it would be useful to actually display a middle initial.   Therefore, could we have a per user field that allows custom initials to be entered, or in fact allows shortened tags per user to be used inside discussions in reviews? ... View more

When i want to go from one page to the next for a review material have to press the NEXT buttons. It means that when I go from page 1 to page 2 I have to press once the next button for the document from left and then the button NEXT for the document from right. I would like to have this switch from one page to another synchronized for both documents and this synchronization to be activated with a "tick". ... View more