The Agile Executive

Not all Agile teams practice strong code reviews, but one of the original Agile practices (sort of long forgotten, it seems) of paired programming was all about code review. As such, I thought I’d cross-post these two videos going over what one RedMonk client, SmartBear, does to help make code reviews suck less. –Coté

Yesterday SmartBear released version 6.0 of CodeCollaborator, the popular code reviewing tool. They’ve added in numerous features, of course, with highlights like handling asset as an item to review (like a Word doc), enhancements to the Eclipse plugin, and integration with VisualStudio. Check out the 6.0 feature list for more details.

I discussed the new features with them in the below interview and then got a quick demo:

New features interview

You can download the video directly as well.

Also, a full transcript of the video:

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are in lovely Austin, Texas, at what we have dubbed the SmartBear studio. This is Michael Coté, of course, of RedMonk. And today I am joined by a guest to go over a new release that SmartBear has out. You want to introduce yourself?

Gregg Sporar: Thank you, Michael. Yes, my name is Gregg Sporar. I have a face made for radio, but yet we are going to record this on video.

Actually, that was the great thing about doing the podcast, because it’s a podcast and it’s just my voice.

Michael Coté: …[the podcast] on code reviewing.

Gregg Sporar: But then, you took this giant picture of me and put that on the blog, and I am thinking, dude, more of a Gravatar. We don’t need — here, we are. We are talking about Code Collaborator v6.0.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Just to give us like a really quick introduction, like what does CodeCollaborator do for people who don’t know off the top of their head?

Gregg Sporar: CodeCollaborator’s sole goal in life is to automate the grunt work parts of the peer code review process. So the collecting of the files and making them available on a central location. Coordinating the communication between the review participants and tracking what everybody says and where defects are found and that kind of thing, and then reporting the statistics at the end.

Michael Coté: What release number is this one?

Gregg Sporar: We are talking about version 6.0.

Michael Coté: So in 6.0, so tell us what the new features are? What’s going to get people excited about this release?

Gregg Sporar: There are several things. Let’s back up for just a second to version 5.0 last year, when we added support for reviewing materials other than just source files. The reason for that was, because a lot of our customers, you are dealing with a software development team, but there are other people on the periphery as well, that might want to be involved in the review. If you’re building embedded software, it might be that the firmware guys or the hardware design guy, he wants to be involved and he wants to see his schematic in that.

Michael Coté: Right.

Gregg Sporar: Then we also had just regular software development teams coming to us saying, well, this is great, but I would like to add the design document to the review and look at it and reference it from within the same tool.

So last year we added support for PDF files, for example, and for image files, for JPEGs, and PNGs, and GIFs, and that kind of thing.

Michael Coté: And that allows you to add in all the commentary and the usual meta information on a piece of code?

Gregg Sporar: Exactly! So whenever I would show the PDF feature to people, they would say, well, that’s great, but I would really like to do this with a Word document.

Michael Cote:: Sure.

Gregg Sporar: So there is a plug-in that Microsoft makes available to create a PDF off of a Word document, but people don’t want to do that. They just want to take their document and put it in place. So that’s one of the key features in 6.0.

The way we actually implemented that is kind of interesting. We built a Windows printer driver, because, again, at the end of the day, we just need to be able to render something and paginate it and put it into the tool. The best way to do that really in that environment is a printer driver. So it’s not just Word, it’s not just Microsoft Office apps, it’s any Windows app that can render paginated output.

Other major features. A significant enhancement to our Eclipse plug-in, which we have had for a few years now. In the past it was limited to just being able to show you or actually just being able to create a review or add materials to a review, and now we have actually brought the entire review experience directly into the IDE.

Another thing that we have gotten a lot of request for is for Visual Studio. Not everybody uses Eclipse, believe it or not. So what we have done is just sort of an initial entrée into the Visual Studio world, we have essentially got functionality equivalent to what we had in our old Eclipse plug-in.

So again, I don’t have that ability to bring the review experience in, like I have done now and with the guys that built for our Eclipse plug-in, but it’s a start. It gets you partway there.

Again, to let you stay within your working context, to at least be able to create the review or add materials to that.

Then there are what I call Red Meat features. Not RedMonk, Red Meat. This is the real type stuff, because these are features that you don’t have to be an Eclipse user or Visual Studio user, this is something that’s going to affect everybody.

This is, for example, one of the things that a lot of people have asked for, for a long time, the ability to delete a comment after you put it in to the tool. We are not actually going to allow you to delete, we are going to allow you to redact the comment.

Michael Cote:: Right.

Gregg Sporar: I will show that to you during the demo. The reason for that is, we can’t really completely remove it, because it would break the IM type paradigm for our real-time track capability. I mean, think about it, if you were IMing with somebody —

Michael Cote:: And it just disappeared.

Gregg Sporar: And it just disappeared while you were reading it, that would kind of freak you out. That breaks that paradigm.

Michael Cote:: It’s kind of like that email recall feature, which is a little strange in its own right.

Gregg Sporar: Which is a little strange in its own right. Then the other issue of course is, we have a lot of customers who, auditability, traceability, that kind of thing, is really important. Nothing can ever be deleted.

Michael Coté: Sure.

Gregg Sporar: So we are going to allow you to redact a comment. We have changed the way that we display defects within the file comparison window. We have added, again, some of these usability type features that affect everybody.

We have made some enhancements to our ClearCase Integration. We have also put in some pretty important enhancements to our integration at the other end of the spectrum to Git and Mercurial.

Michael Coté: And how many version control systems do you guys work with now?

Gregg Sporar: 16.

Michael Coté: 16? That’s pretty nice.

Gregg Sporar: That’s a rather large number.

Michael Coté: That’s probably more than most people could name off.

Gregg Sporar: So a fun drinking game is to get a couple of beers in me and then try to get me to list the 16 in reverse alphabetical order, because I can do it in alphabetical order, but reverse alphabetical order is a little more difficult.

One last [thing], maybe, to mention really quickly. We did, and this is again something that you can’t appreciate unless you are an existing user of the product, we have significantly enhanced some of our reporting capabilities. That’s kind of that third pillar of what it is we do.

For the customizable reports, where the user can build their own query, we have added some additional fields that they can now filter on and select and that kind of thing.

Then we put a lot of effort into adding what we call user-oriented reports. So we have always had review-oriented reports and defect-oriented reports, that again, primary key is information about the review overall or primary key is, tell me about the defects that were found, but now we have added a third category, which is, tell me what I have been doing.

Michael Coté: I always think of that as self-micromanagement. Sort of optimize your own self.

Gregg Sporar: So one of the features, it is the ability for me to come in after the fact into the tool and find out, well, what reviews did I work on during the last week? I had a guy at a customer site explain to me this feature, because when he is doing his weekly status report, he knows he typically spends about 10-20% of his time during a week doing code review. Well, he wants to know, what reviews he did.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Gregg Sporar: So again, user-oriented reporting.

Michael Coté: Well, great! Well, let’s check out a demo of those features and see what we get to see.

Demo

You can download the video directly as well.

There’s also a nice wrap-up of posts detailing features on the Smartbear blog.