DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear Software released a new version of Collaborator, a peer code and document review tool that helps development, testing and management teams work together to produce high quality code, applications and services.

The latest release of Collaborator adds a new integration with GitLab and has enhanced existing integrations with Atlassian’s Bitbucket and GitHub. Now Collaborator is the only peer code and document review tool that integrates with the three largest repository management solutions. These integrations provide the flexibility for development teams to leverage a single peer code and document review tool across teams, regardless of the repository or version control tools they are using.

This new functionality allows users that desire a more robust peer review process to automatically create Collaborator code reviews any time a pull request is created. In addition to creating the Collaborator review, the pull request can be merged or the branch deleted once the Collaborator review completes.

“As enterprises increasingly focus on agility, they don’t want to leave software quality in the dust,” said Donnie Berkholz, Research Director at 451 Research. “SmartBear Collaborator integrates with popular Git-based offerings and includes automatically triggered code review, which aims to help development organizations deliver higher-quality code and continual process improvement.”

SmartBear also continues to focus on Collaborator’s document review capabilities by adding pan, zoom and scroll features. Document review users can quickly and easily zoom in on files by using their mouse scroll wheel and then pan around the document by clicking and dragging. The ability to create customizable syntax highlighting schemes that allow for unique keyword identification outside of what is offered by default in Collaborator has also been added.

“More teams are looking for solutions that allow them to extend the code review capabilities that are offered in GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab,” said Justin Collier, Product Owner, Collaborator at SmartBear. “Collaborator is a tool purposely built to help teams achieve this. Organizations have always seen document review as a priority for improving their final deliverables; however, many teams are still reviewing documents using Microsoft Word’s track changes and comments feature. Though great for two people to collaborate, it becomes much more cumbersome as additional people are added to an email chain. Collaborator 11.0 delivers enhancements that allow easy document review for the entire team.”

Collaborator 11.0 delivers one tool for code and document review with the ability to integrate with repository management solutions while keeping the Collaborator workflow that users are familiar with.

Collaborator is available in three versions – Community, Team and Enterprise.