Collaborator

Collaborator is SmartBear's self-hosted peer review tool for code, documents and models, built for regulated teams that need audit trails and e-signatures.

Collaborator gives development teams one place to review code, documents and models, with a record of every comment, defect and sign-off. It is meant for teams that must show an auditor that a review took place, who joined it and what it found. Collaborator comes from SmartBear, the Somerville, Massachusetts company behind Swagger and TestComplete. SmartBear offers it in Community, Team and Enterprise editions. Code review opens on the change itself, with chat threaded by line and defects pinned to the exact spot until someone fixes them. Document Review applies the same process to requirements, design docs, user stories and test cases, in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, PNG or PDF files. Review templates combine custom fields, participant rules and checklists, so each project enforces its own workflow. Reports and Metrics turn defect data into audit reports, and electronic signatures close a review with a recorded approval. The ccollab command-line client and the Eclipse and Visual Studio integrations let authors start a review without leaving their tools. Collaborator suits engineering groups in automotive, aviation, aerospace and defense, medical devices and health care, and financial services, where a review record belongs with each release. Developers and testers do the reviewing, while quality leads and compliance managers read the reports. It also fits shops that mix Perforce, TFS, Subversion or Mercurial with Git, since one review server covers all of them. Organizations that keep review data inside their own network run it on their own server, installed directly or in Docker. A review often starts from a GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket pull request, or from a Perforce changelist, and Collaborator keeps it in step with the Jira issue it addresses. Test leads review test plans on the same server, so code and the documents that justify it share one history. Teams that keep test cases in Confluence review them there through a plug-in. Engineers working in MathWorks Simulink can review models on the same server as their code. When an audit comes, the review history, defect log and signatures are already gathered in one place.